Perfect Is the Enemy of Good: Where the Phrase Actually Comes From
The Start Here page has been promising this explanation since the beginning: why the blog is named what it’s named. Here it is, finally: where the phrase actually comes from, why I picked the version of it I did, and what I think most people get wrong about it.
Where the phrase actually comes from
Voltaire gets credit for this one in English, but he was quoting somebody else. In 1770, in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, he cites what he calls an old Italian proverb: “Il meglio è l’inimico del bene,” the best is the enemy of the good. The same line shows up in his poem La Bégueule, which opens by crediting “a wise Italian” for the idea (source). Voltaire popularized it. He didn’t coin it.
He wasn’t even first to write it down. Roughly 40 years earlier, Montesquieu had already put a version of the same idea to paper: “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien,” the best is the mortal enemy of the good (source). This is an old observation that a few different people kept independently arriving at, not a single writer’s clever line.
The word that quietly changed
Notice the actual word in both of those: best, not perfect. Somewhere in translation and a couple centuries of retelling, “best” became “perfect,” and that’s the version that stuck in everyday use (source). It’s a small swap that changes what the phrase is actually claiming. “Best” implies a comparison between real, available options. “Perfect” implies a fixed, often unreachable ideal that doesn’t move no matter how much you improve.
That distinction turned out to matter more to me than I expected when I was picking a name for this blog.
Why I named the blog after it
I started this blog after Celeste Naturals was already up and running, trying to figure out what I actually wanted to put into it: lessons, complaints, half-formed thoughts, whatever seemed worth capturing. And almost immediately I caught myself making the exact same mistake I’d made launching the business in the first place. I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I had anything worth saying. I’m not the best writer, I’m definitely not the wittiest, and I felt the same imposter discomfort trying to justify why anyone should read this that I’d felt trying to justify why anyone should buy soap from two people who’d never worked a market.
That’s when the name landed. Good, bad, embarrassing in hindsight, whatever it turned out to be, I just needed to actually write something instead of continuing to circle the idea of writing something. The name isn’t a clever branding choice. It’s a permission slip I had to write for myself before I’d let myself start.
Why “perfect,” and not “best”
I lean toward the “perfect” version specifically because “best” is a moving target, and measuring yourself against a target that keeps relocating is a losing game. My best when I started this blog is going to be shallow, missing hindsight, occasionally incoherent, compared to whatever I’m capable of a year from now. That’s not a flaw in the plan. That’s just what early output from anyone actually looks like.
Perfect doesn’t move. It sits out there as a fixed, usually unreachable standard that has nothing to do with where you currently are in getting better at something. I can be giving a task my best effort, right now, today, and still be producing something rough, because “best effort” and “finished quality” are not the same measurement. Chasing best, my own included, at least tracks something real. Chasing perfect just guarantees you’ll always come up short of a target that was never going to hold still.
I don’t have one clean story where this phrase changed a specific decision, the way our first market launch did. What I have instead is about two decades of being a recovering perfectionist, and this phrase functioning as a standing reminder that I’m allowed to openly suck a little bit more than I’d like to.
Where I think people get this wrong
Two things, and the second one is the correction to the first.
First: people conflate “doing your best” with “being the best.” That’s probably the actual root of the mistake most people make with this idea. Your best, measured against everyone else doing the same thing, might not be very good. That’s fine. It’s supposed to be fine at the start. The job isn’t to arrive already excellent, it’s to put in the effort, keep learning, and let iteration sand the rough edges off over time until what started rough turns into something you’re actually proud of.
Second, and this is the half-truth I need to correct in my own argument: “your best being bad right now is okay” is conditional, not unconditional. Rejecting perfectionism is not the same thing as accepting permanent mediocrity. If you’re tackling something and you’re not learning, not improving, not moving the needle even slightly over time, it’s probably time to find a different challenge, not a reason to keep pointing at this phrase as cover. Being bad at something starting out is fine. Staying bad on purpose, using “perfect is the enemy of good” as the excuse, isn’t humility — it’s defeatism.
That’s the whole spirit this blog runs on, and why the name stuck the moment I landed on it.