Good Enough Archives - understand-culture

The Little Shop of Horrors

In December 1959 Roger Corman shot the interiors of The Little Shop of Horrors in two days, on a standing set at the old Chaplin Studios. The actors were hired for one week, three days of rehearsal and two of shooting. Exterior scenes took four more evenings. The film cost less than $30,000 and earned back its cost.

Corman titled his memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. “I had never thought of myself as doing Great Art,” he said. “I felt I was working as a craftsman.” Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese worked for him early in their careers. In 2009 he received an honorary Academy Award.

Semi-Homemade

In October 2003 the Food Network launched Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee. Lee’s rule is to use “70 percent packaged products and 30 percent fresh ingredients.” One profile explained the idea: “it takes some of the complexity out of cooking, allowing even the busiest person to find time to cook at home.” The show ran for 15 seasons. In 2012 Lee won a Daytime Emmy as a culinary host.

Maximizers and Satisficers

In 2002 the Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz and five colleagues published a study of “maximizers,” who look for the best option, and “satisficers,” who stop at good enough. Across seven samples they found “negative correlations between maximization and happiness” and “positive correlations between maximization and depression.” In one study, maximizers were “more sensitive to regret.”

In his book The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz wrote: “To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough …” In a 2014 Reddit Q&A, he gave short advice: “‘Good enough’ is almost always good enough.” The Atlantic quoted it in 2015.

The Good Enough Revolution

In 2009 Wired magazine published “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” It opened with the Flip Ultra video camera. The Flip was “stripped-down” and cost $150. A midpriced Sony camcorder cost $800. The Flip sold more than a million units in its first year. By 2009 it held 17 percent of the U.S. camcorder market.

The writer, Robert Capps, argued that buyers now valued three things: “ease of use, continuous availability, and low price.” To get them, “they’ll happily sacrifice power and features.”

One Dollar for Two

The American civil engineer Arthur M. Wellington wrote a book on how to lay out railroads, The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways. In its introduction he wrote that engineering is “rather the art of not constructing.” Then he defined it “rudely but not inaptly.” It is “the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.”

Wellington was editor and part owner of Engineering News. He died in 1895. His idea is still repeated in a shorter form: “An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two.”

Good Enough Quality

In 1997 the software tester James Bach published “Good Enough Quality: Beyond the Buzzword” in the magazine Computer. To call something good enough, he wrote, you must agree with four claims. The first three are “It has sufficient benefits,” “It has no critical problems,” and “The benefits sufficiently outweigh the problems.” The fourth is “In the present situation, and all things considered, further improvement would be more harmful than helpful.”

Bach rejected the idea of “the minimum quality that you can get away with.” He wrote: “Good Enough has nothing to do with mediocrity.” His example was Microsoft, which “knows how to ship with the right bugs.” Bach’s testing company is called Satisfice, Inc.

Worse Is Better

In a section of an essay first written in 1989, the software designer Richard P. Gabriel described two ways to design. One aims for “the right thing.” The other he called “worse is better,” and he used early Unix and the C language as examples. In that approach, “It is slightly better to be simple than correct.” Another rule is: “Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality.”

Gabriel argued that the simpler approach “has better survival characteristics.” He concluded: “It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus.” The essay spread among programmers from 1991. In 2000 Gabriel answered himself under a pen name, in an essay called “Worse Is Better Is Worse.”

To the C Students

On May 21, 2001, President George W. Bush spoke at the Yale commencement, 33 years after his own Yale degree. “To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done,” he said. “And to the C students,” he went on, and the audience applauded, “I say, you, too, can be President of the United States.”

College students have a shorter version: “C’s get degrees.” A 2024 opinion piece in the student newspaper of The College of New Jersey explained it. “With minimal effort and average grades, one can still finish four years of college with a paper diploma.” The headline called it “a dangerous mentality.”

Close Enough

Close enough for government work. It is not worth spending more time to perfect this. The phrase appears in print in 1962, in NASA reports on the first American orbital flights.

Close enough for jazz. This is the musicians’ version. It has been in print since at least 1937. That year Billboard printed it as a stock musicians’ joke, said after the saxophones tune up.

Good enough for who it’s for. The job was not done perfectly, but it was done well enough for the people it was done for.

Wiktionary labels the government phrase “humorous” and “disparaging.” A popular story says it began in World War II as praise for exacting standards. Members of the American Dialect Society searched for evidence and found “nothing to support” it.

The Ugly Duckling

Between 1941 and 1945, eighteen American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships. The design was chosen for its “simple, low-cost construction.” The ships were made “assembly-line style, from prefabricated sections.” Joshua Smith of the American Merchant Marine Museum notes that they were throwaway ships with a five-year life expectancy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the ship “a dreadful looking object.” Time magazine called it the “Ugly Duckling.”

Early Liberty ships suffered cracks in the hull and deck. Three Liberty ships broke in half. Some ships sailed far longer than their five-year design life.