Good Enough or As Good as It Can Be?

Left to my own devices, I would eat like a monk with low standards and no culinary imagination. If I were a bachelor living alone, my menu would consist of oatmeal, yogurt, bananas, protein shakes, and peanut butter, repeated with liturgical regularity until death or scurvy intervened. Meal preparation, in my ideal world, should require almost no preparation and even less cleanup. If I can eat standing over the kitchen sink and spare myself the burden of washing a plate, I consider that a small triumph of civilization.

Marriage and children have prevented me from fully indulging this philosophy.

Fortunately for my nutritional health—and unfortunately for my laziness—other people insist on actual meals.

My instinct toward optimization, however, resurfaces elsewhere. When planning family outings, my ideal destination is always the closest one. The fewer miles on the odometer, the happier I become. Beach picnic? Wonderful—as long as the beach is practically in the backyard. Restaurant? Excellent—as long as I don’t have to cross two freeways to reach it.

Vacation travel follows the same principle.

Five hours on an airplane is my absolute ceiling. Beyond that, my claustrophobia stages a hostile takeover of my personality. I stop resembling a husband on holiday and begin resembling Cinderella’s forgotten stepbrother, slowly decomposing into a resentful pumpkin somewhere over the Pacific.

Clearly, I possess a strong instinct toward efficiency.

Yet I have gradually realized that some parts of life cannot survive this instinct.

An essay should never be merely good enough. It should be rewritten until every sentence earns its place and every paragraph justifies its existence. Likewise, a composer may spend years reshaping a single piece until it finally matches the elusive musical vision that first appeared in the imagination. The original spark deserves nothing less.

That realization has led me to think that human beings generally organize their lives around one of two competing philosophies.

The first is Optimization Ethics.

Optimization Ethics seeks to maximize efficiency, profit, and measurable return while eliminating effort that produces diminishing rewards. It asks a relentlessly practical question:

How good does this need to be?

The second is Maximalist Ethics.

Maximalist Ethics begins from a completely different premise. It holds that excellence possesses intrinsic worth. The highest obligation is not to satisfy expectations but to produce the fullest, richest, and finest work one is capable of, even when no customer notices, no employer rewards it, and no spreadsheet can justify the additional effort.

Its governing question is equally simple:

How good can this become?

I encountered perhaps the clearest illustration of these competing philosophies while watching Mike Holst’s YouTube channel, This Watch, That Watch. Discussing whether Grand Seiko deserves its reputation, Holst makes an observation that reaches far beyond horology:

“The key difference between Rolex and Grand Seiko is that Rolex generally makes a watch that is as good as it needs to be for the price. Grand Seiko chooses to make a watch that is as good as it can be for the price.”

That may be one of the most insightful business observations I’ve heard in years.

Rolex asks, What level of excellence justifies a $15,000 watch?

Grand Seiko asks, What is the finest watch we know how to build for $15,000?

Those are not merely different manufacturing strategies.

They are different moral imaginations.

Rolex operates according to what I would call Adequacy Culture. Its goal is to satisfy expectations with extraordinary consistency while carefully managing costs, margins, and brand prestige. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. It has produced one of the most successful luxury companies in history.

Grand Seiko, by contrast, embodies Abundance Culture.

Its instinct is to give more than circumstances require—to lavish finishing on surfaces few owners will ever examine, to polish components hidden from casual view, to pursue refinements that accountants would probably classify as unnecessary and customers may never consciously notice.

One philosophy asks, Have we done enough?

The other asks, Have we done our best?

That distinction extends far beyond watches.

A teacher can prepare the lecture that fulfills contractual obligations or the lecture students will remember twenty years later.

A physician can treat symptoms or relentlessly pursue the best possible outcome.

A novelist can submit a manuscript that is publishable or continue revising until every page feels inevitable.

A marriage can consist of meeting expectations or continually exceeding them.

If you are about to spend ten or twenty thousand dollars on a watch, you must decide which philosophy you wish to reward. Would you rather buy from a company whose guiding question is, What do we have to do? Or from one whose guiding question is, What is the finest thing we know how to make?

Rolex has built one of the greatest brands in the world.

Grand Seiko has built one of the greatest arguments for excellence.

Those are not the same achievement. In the long run, they may not even belong to the same philosophy of life.