Growing up there was a newspaper clipping hung on the fridge in my kitchen with the title:
Pretty Good Isn’t Good Enough
This summed up the ethos in my house. It instilled high standards and a strong work ethic (and perhaps a slightly overdeveloped inner critic and perfectionist streak).
In my early twenties, I was walking with a friend and former colleague who casually said, “As my dad always told us:
Perfect is the enemy of good
I literally stopped walking. I had never heard that phrase before.
Later I encountered a third standard while reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert:
Done is better than good. There are only so many hours in a day, after all. There are only so many days in a year, only so many years in a life. You do what you can do, as competently as possible within a reasonable time frame, and then you let it go.
Whoa. Yet again, I felt like the human version of this emoji: 🤯
Not only did these phrases seem to contradict each other, but I was thrown each time by realizing that other people had grown up with entirely different standards. If “perfect is the enemy of good” or “done is better than good” is more accurate, was the standard I learned wrong?!
Eventually, I realized I was asking the wrong question. None of these standards is inherently better than the others. They only contradict each other when we try to apply them at the same time. Part of the work of leadership is choosing the right standard for the situation and making that standard clear to everyone involved.
So how does this show up in our meetings? Two key ways:
1) Different moments require different standards
I can tell you from experience that “pretty good isn’t good enough” cannot be applied to your work or life as a universal standard without paying a price. Instead, we get to apply different standards to different things depending on our priorities and the stakes.
To decide which standard to apply, weigh what could be gained from doing something better against what the additional effort would cost:
- What would I gain by taking this from pretty good to great?
- How much additional time would that require?
- What else could I do with that time?
- What are the realistic consequences of stopping at pretty good?
- If those consequences happen, what will I do?
I like to think about each task, project, and yes, each meeting or even meeting building block, through this lens. When I have a meeting-heavy week, I pick one or two that deserve more than pretty good. For those meetings, I might invest time in planning a strategic warm-up question, more complex structured engagement, or a longer pre-read.
For the majority of our meetings, perfect is the enemy of good. I’ll still write clear objectives for each, but I might reuse the same warm-up question across several meetings that week.
Then I figure out where done is better than good. “Done” still needs to be accurate, useful, and appropriate for the stakes. This might look like sending out the AI notes instead of my own notes or quickly asking for a one-word check-out in the chat.
Once you’ve decided done is better than good, ask one more question: Does this need to get done at all?
2) Other people may be working from a different standard
Choosing the right standard for your own work is only half the challenge.
Other people bring their own definitions of “done” to the workplace. Those definitions are shaped by lifelong lessons and assumptions about expectations, effort, and stakes. When others are involved, we have to make our expectations visible through the context and clarity we provide as leaders.
When you’re delegating a new task or project, or leading a project kickoff meeting, make implicit assumptions about the required quality as explicit as possible.
Being explicit doesn’t just mean being clear and specific, but it also means explaining why this matters:
“Extreme attention to detail matters in our internal presentations, even informal ones, because the quality of our slides helps build trust in our team’s work.”
“By Friday's meeting, the executive team needs the best data we have, along with its assumptions and limitations. An incomplete analysis they can use is better than no input from our team, or a comprehensive analysis that arrives after the decision.”
Leading intentionally does not mean maximizing your effort everywhere. It means choosing where excellence matters, where pretty good is enough, and where completion, or elimination, is the better choice. Then, when other people are involved, it means making that standard explicit.
Look at your next week of meetings and ask yourself:
- Where will you aim for great?
- Where is pretty good enough?
- What can simply get done?
- And what can be declined or canceled?
And where do you need to make those expectations more explicit to someone else?
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