At the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, James Naismith invented a new indoor game. He asked a janitor to find two boxes to use as goals. The janitor brought him two peach baskets instead. They were hung about 10 feet above the floor. The ball was a soccer ball. The first game was played in December 1891.
After each score, someone had to get the ball out of the basket. The game kept the name of the object at hand: basketball.
On April 19, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its first flight on Mars. It ran on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, “a processor traditionally found in smartphones like Samsung’s Galaxy S5.” NASA used commercially available parts. Ingenuity completed 72 flights.
JPL engineer Tim Canham explained the choice: “The main driver is because the Snapdragon 801 board came already with Linux.” In 2026, with Ingenuity grounded, JPL gave the helicopter’s idle base station on the Perseverance rover a new job. Its processor now helps the rover find its own position. JPL’s Vandi Verma said: “This is kind of like giving the rover GPS.”
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” is widely credited to Theodore Roosevelt. In his Autobiography of 1913, Roosevelt gave the credit to someone else. He called it “a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener’s Valley, Virginia.”
The Theodore Roosevelt Center says the popular version is “misquoted in two ways.” Roosevelt credited Widener, and the original says “got,” not “have”: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
On April 18, 1942, 16 Army B-25 bombers took off from the Navy aircraft carrier USS Hornet to bomb Japan. None of the pilots, including the raid’s leader, Jimmy Doolittle, had ever taken off from a carrier before. The idea came from a Navy officer, Captain Francis Low.
The bombers were changed for a job they were not built for. Their fuel capacity was raised from 646 to about 1,141 gallons. Broomsticks painted black were mounted in the tail to look like guns. The secret Norden bombsight was replaced with a makeshift sight devised by pilot Ross Greening, described as a “20 cent aluminum version.” The crews trained for three weeks in short takeoffs that simulated a carrier deck.
On Apollo 17 in December 1972, astronaut Gene Cernan’s hammer caught the rear fender extension of the lunar rover, “and it popped clean off.” Without the fender, driving through the Moon dust “became a serious hazard.” A first repair with tape failed because “the tape lost its adhesiveness” in the dust.
A team in Houston worked out a fix with what the crew had on board. The astronauts took four of their lunar maps and fixed them to the fender with tape and “two clamps from the optical alignment telescope.” The Smithsonian’s account calls the tape “good old-fashioned American gray tape.” The four maps are now at the National Air and Space Museum.
American building codes set a minimum, not an ideal. The Massachusetts building code states its purpose: “to establish the minimum requirements to safeguard the public health, safety and general welfare.”
In everyday American speech, the question asked about a building, a deck or a wiring job is whether it is “up to code.”
American business English has several phrases for doing more than a problem needs.
boil the ocean — to take on an overwhelmingly large task. In 2010 Meg Whitman, then a candidate for governor of California, said she would not try to “boil the ocean.”
bells and whistles — extra features beyond what is needed.
over-engineered — built to a higher standard than the job requires. The word is used as criticism.
it gets the job done — praise for something that works, however plain.
good to go — ready, with nothing more to add.
General George S. Patton’s best-known rule is usually quoted as “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” In his book War As I Knew It (1947), under the heading “Don’t Delay,” it reads: “a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”
The idea was older. In 1929 the British writer Sir Frederick Maurice praised “a reasonably good plan carried through with promptness and determination.” By 1979 an American book had turned it into everyday advice: “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
At The Basic School, where the Marine Corps trains its new officers, a handout on decision making teaches “The 70% Solution.” It says: “We must learn to accept uncertainty and execute quickly with an imperfect plan.”
It warns: “We must guard against waiting for a perfect sight picture, which may never come, leading to inaction.” The reason it gives: “We are competing in time with the enemy.”
In 2001 Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School told an alumni conference that companies give customers more than they can use: “overshooting is always inconceivable, and overshooting always happens.” His example: “Microsoft has way overshot what the customer needs.”
In Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, overshooting opens the way for rivals that are cheaper and simpler. Such an innovation becomes disruptive only in a market where customers are being given more than they need.