The difference between progress and perfection
Launch library · evergreen read
Progress and perfection are often confused, but they are measuring genuinely different things: progress asks whether a situation is better than it used to be, while perfection asks whether a situation has reached some ideal, final state, and the two answers can point in entirely different directions at once.
A situation can be improving steadily, genuinely getting better year after year, while still remaining far from perfect, and treating the ongoing presence of real problems as proof that no progress has occurred is a common but ultimately misleading way to read the evidence in front of you.
Holding both ideas at once, real progress and continuing imperfection, tends to produce a more accurate and honestly motivating picture than either extreme alone: neither the false comfort of believing everything is basically fine, nor the discouragement of believing nothing has ever actually improved. What looks incidental at first glance often turns out, on closer inspection, to matter a great deal.