A computer designer in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Soul of a New Machine, was fond of saying, “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.” He was talking about product development.

That notion of doing less than your best rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I’m one of them. Second-rate work, whether in books or any other professional endeavor, doesn’t seem to pay.

But a quick-and-dirty effort does have its place. That was the belief of the engineer: No sense making a big investment if you don’t know yet if a rough prototype works.

The same is true at times in developing a book. A case in point is a first draft. I’ve blogged before about “70% drafting.” Working to perfection on a first draft isn’t worth the time. As Margaret Atwood said, "If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

You’ll have to rewrite early chapters anyway after realizing, several chapters down the line, that the first few were off the mark. (They always are.)

The lesson is that a well-done book, efficiently and effectively written, may actually come to fruition through some shortcutting. This is the time, as Voltaire said, that perfect is the enemy of good.

The hardware engineer certainly knew that. He went on to produce a commercial megahit in computer technology worth billions of dollars.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published September 24, 2014]