Good enough has never been easier.
Anyone can ship a decent website this afternoon. Anyone can generate a clean doc, a passable design, a serviceable app, in minutes. The baseline has gone vertical, and it’s still climbing.
Which unfortunately means that good enough is worth almost nothing.
The edge now is found in the last two percent. The small, intentional tweaks that take almost no time and change everything. The part that takes “taste”, as everyone likes to say now.
In hindsight, I learned this in Year 10, doing something faintly ridiculous.
Every assignment I handed in, I’d add a cover page. I’d type the assignment title, the teacher’s name, then mine. I’d insert a shape, colour it blue, drop the opacity, and wedge it into the corner. It looked terrible. A fourteen-year-old’s idea of design.
But it meant my assignment wasn’t the fiftieth wall of plain text in the pile. It looked like someone had cared. I’ve never been able to prove it, but I’d put money on that ugly blue rectangle doing more for my grades in high school than the actual studying did.
Two minutes of finish, against a room full of good enough.
I never really stopped. This personal website, nothing left at default. The internal dashboard at VenueNow that only our team will ever open, where I still sweated the small quality of life tweaks no one asked for.
Not because it was required. The thing already worked, and no one would have really noticed.
But because it made it stand out. It made eight hours of work feel like fifty, with two minutes of extra effort.
That’s the catch with the last two percent. It’s never the part you have to do. It’s the part after the job is technically done.
So… all this to say… add the cover page, sweat the design of that button, put some effort into garnishing your girlfriend’s eggs in the morning.
Not because it’ll change your life.
But because it’s two minutes, and it’s worth it.