I’ve been fortunate to have mentors who fundamentally changed how I think about building and scaling. This is part of an ongoing series where I share the insights that have stayed with me — because the best lessons shouldn’t sit with one person.
This one came from G.F. — and it’s one I’ve come back to more times than I can count:
“Best is the worst enemy of good.”
The perfectionism trap
How many times have you found yourself stuck in an endless loop of refinement — tweaking, improving, adjusting — while the actual delivery keeps slipping?
It happens in product development. It happens in operations. It happens in any business where someone with high standards is in charge of something that could always be a little better.
Perfectionism feels responsible. It feels like quality control. But in practice, it’s one of the most consistent business efficiency killers I’ve encountered. The pursuit of best, when good is already sufficient, destroys timelines, inflates costs, and hands competitive advantage to whoever was willing to ship first.
One of the most important lessons I learned early in my career is that perfection doesn’t exist. There is always room for improvement. The question is never “is this perfect?” — it’s “is this good enough to move forward?”
Knowing when good is good enough
This isn’t an argument for low standards. It’s an argument for clarity about what the standard actually needs to be at each stage of a project.
At Ferrari and Rimac-Bugatti, we were building some of the most demanding machines ever made. Standards were extremely high. But even in those environments, the ability to make a clear call on product readiness — to say “this is sufficient to proceed” — was what separated teams that delivered from teams that were perpetually developing.
The same applies in any business. Business efficiency depends on the ability to make confident decisions about readiness and move forward — not on the ability to make something incrementally better indefinitely.
The four ingredients that make it possible
Getting comfortable with “good enough” requires having genuine confidence in your process. Without structure, the instinct to keep refining is actually rational — because you can’t be sure the product is ready if you haven’t properly assessed the risks.
The ingredients that give you that confidence are straightforward. A clear plan with defined timelines creates accountability and makes it visible when refinement is consuming more than it’s contributing. A proper risk assessment means you’ve already identified the areas that genuinely require more work — so you’re not guessing. A skilled and agile team can execute, adapt, and make judgment calls without everything flowing through one person. And a willingness to release minimum viable products — getting real feedback from customers and investors rather than internal opinions — replaces speculation with evidence.
With these in place, the decision to ship stops being a gamble. It becomes a structured call based on what you actually know.
The business efficiency argument for shipping
Getting to market first is a business efficiency multiplier. Every week spent perfecting something that is already good enough is a week a competitor is building market share, customer relationships, and operational momentum.
The businesses I work with across Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia that scale most effectively are not the ones with the most refined products at launch. They’re the ones that shipped confidently, gathered real feedback, and improved from there.
That’s not a compromise on quality. It’s a smarter approach to achieving it.
Want to find where perfectionism or unclear processes are slowing your business down? Take the free RISE Assessment — 10 minutes, instant results.