Good Enough > Perfection jordanmarsh6, August 4, 2021April 5, 2023 I took an AP physics class in high school. It was my first exposure to physics. I didn’t pass the test at the end of the year, which meant that I needed to retake physics in college to pursue engineering like I wanted to. This was a good thing, since I needed to sharpen my metaphorical physics saw. I did learn one equation in that AP physics class though that seemed important: Force = Mass * Acceleration. In short, F=ma. This equation is a big deal; Newton’s second law. Fortunately for me, I thought quite a bit about this one. For example, have you ever wondered why we can travel at such high speeds in airplanes or cars and feel like we’re just sitting on a normal chair? Shouldn’t we just be glued to the back of our seat? Well F=ma answers this. We feel that glued-to-the-back-of-our-seat force when we are accelerating (the a in F=ma), not when we’re travelling at a constant speed. That’s a miracle to me, because if it wasn’t true I don’t think we would tolerate travelling at high speeds well at all. I’m not a rocket scientist, but I can appreciate how many things can be described by this simple little equation F=ma. Going into college, I felt like I could rely on this foundational truth to do a better job in the class. You might imagine my surprise then when my professor in college said something very interesting about F=ma that made me question it. “F=ma isn’t perfect,” he said, “But it was good enough to get us to the moon. So we used it.” His point was that F=ma works well on earth where we are familiar with it, but there are some observations made about stars in far-away galaxies where F=ma doesn’t necessarily hold up. I don’t know about you, but when I imagine the calculations required to land a human on the moon, I suspect that they better be perfect. Had the family members of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin heard F=ma is “good enough” to get us to the moon, I’m sure it might have made the hair on the back of their necks stand on end. When the stakes seem so high, “good enough” just doesn’t seem right. However, we did send humans to the moon using F=ma. It was “good enough” to produce an incredible achievement. The more and more I think about what stops us from accomplishing what we want, I think it’s clear we let “perfect” get in the way of “good enough”. Perfection is intimidating. “Good enough” is attainable. I feel much more empowered to start something new when I feel like it must be good enough, rather than it must be perfect. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough! Self Improvement