The Swiss thrive on perfection. There is a reason you’re known for our quality lenses, precision tools, watches, fine chocolates, and amazing cheeses, alas with holes. “Good enough” you wouldn’t hear in Switzerland and even if it were true for certain things, it wouldn’t be verbalized.

As a Swiss transplant to New York and now a proud American citizen it took a moment to wrap my brain around “good enough”. Occasionally I do cross-cultural coaching and we spend quite a bit of time discussing “The 80/20”; meaning, Americans don’t believe in perfect. The remaining 20% to get something from good enough to perfect is not worth the effort, time and money. (You know I’m generalizing here, but you get the picture).

Dealing with “good enough” can be very frustrating when you’re used to “perfect”, but it can also be very liberating.

If you’ve read this blog on occasion you know of my efforts to understand where my industry is headed. And by “my industry” I mean all things digital media, especially audio-visual media (film, video) in a social media and corporate marketing setting.

Three things are crystal clear:

  1. First, video and infographics are the communication tools of the future. Digital Natives (born after 2000) prefer to watch video over reading text. If you have something to say, you SAY it (as I’m writing this the irony isn’t lost on me).
  1. Secondly “good enough” is good enough. Today’s Millennials and tomorrow’s Digital Natives have grown up on YouTube quality video, I think it’s safe to say; quality doesn’t matter as much, it’s the content that counts.
  1. And thirdly: be brief, be succinct. There are thousands of more videos waiting to be watched: get to the point. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most in-phone editing apps are free for the under 30 second video clip.

If we want to tap into the growing need for video, we need to produce fast, cheap and make it scalable for our customers. That’s how we will remain relevant: it will be good enough. And don’t think for a second that our work will be less brilliant; it will be good enough and awesome.

Courtesy Jeffrey Swanson Unsplash.com
Courtesy Jeffrey Swanson Unsplash.com

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