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There is a particular kind of pride people take in calling themselves perfectionists. They say it in job interviews. They whisper it like a confession that is actually a brag. “I just care too much about quality.” It sounds noble. It sounds like the mark of someone who refuses to settle.
But Herbert Simon, a man who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978, had a different word for this behavior. He did not call it admirable. He called it irrational.
Not irrational in the way we casually use the word, like eating a third slice of cake at midnight. Irrational in the technical, provable, this-does-not-make-logical-sense meaning. Simon spent decades studying how humans make decisions, and he arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: the pursuit of the perfect choice is not just exhausting. It is fundamentally incompatible with how reality works.
The Man Who Noticed What Economists Ignored
To understand why Simon’s ideas still matter, you need to understand what he was arguing against.
Classical economics in the mid twentieth century was built on a beautiful fiction. It assumed that human beings are perfectly rational agents. That when faced with a decision, people gather all available information, evaluate every possible option, calculate the expected utility of each one, and then calmly select the best. Economists called this imaginary creature “Homo Economicus,” and they built entire models of the world around its behavior.
Simon looked at this and, to put it politely, thought it was nonsense.
Not because people are stupid. Because people are finite. We have limited time. Limited attention. Limited memory. Limited computational power in our skulls. The world throws more information at us than we could process in a thousand lifetimes. The idea that a person buying a car or choosing a career or even picking a restaurant for dinner is running some internal optimization algorithm is, Simon argued, a fantasy that has nothing to do with how decisions actually get made.
He introduced a concept he called “bounded rationality.” The idea is simple but its implications are enormous: human beings are rational, but only within boundaries. We do not optimize. We cannot optimize. We do something else entirely.
Satisficing: The Word That Sounds Wrong But Is Right
Simon coined a term for what humans actually do when they make decisions. He called it “satisficing,” a combination of “satisfy” and “suffice.” It means choosing an option that is good enough. Not the best. Not the optimal. Just good enough to meet your criteria and move on with your life.
This sounds lazy. It sounds like settling. And that is precisely why most people resist it.
But here is where it gets interesting. Simon was not making a moral argument about what people should do. He was making an empirical observation about what people actually do, and then demonstrating that this behavior is, paradoxically, more rational than the alternative.
Think about it this way. You need to hire someone for a job. The “perfect” approach would be to interview every qualified candidate on the planet, rank them all, and hire the best one. Obviously, you cannot do this. You do not have infinite time or infinite resources. So instead, you set some standards. You interview candidates until you find one who meets those standards. Then you hire that person and get back to running your business.
That is satisficing. And it is what every functional organization on Earth does every single day.
The perfectionist, by contrast, is the person who keeps interviewing. Who always thinks the next candidate might be slightly better. Who agonizes over whether candidate number twelve was marginally stronger than candidate number seven. Who delays the hire so long that the best candidates have already taken other offers.
The perfectionist, in Simon’s framework, is not the most rational person in the room. They are the least rational. They are spending resources they do not have in pursuit of information they cannot obtain to make a distinction that probably does not matter.
The Hidden Cost That Perfectionists Never Count
One of the most revealing aspects of perfectionist thinking is what it ignores: the cost of the decision process itself.
Every minute you spend deliberating is a minute you are not spending acting. Every hour lost to comparison shopping, second guessing, and tweaking is an hour that had value, and you spent it on the search rather than on the thing the search was supposed to enable.
Simon understood this deeply. In his framework, the resources you burn while trying to find the optimal solution are real costs. And perfectionists, almost without exception, fail to account for them. They track the quality of the output obsessively while completely ignoring the cost of the process.
This is like a business that spends ten million dollars on consultants to figure out how to save eight million dollars and then celebrates the savings. The math does not work. But the spreadsheet looks impressive.
There is a concept in computer science called the “optimal stopping problem,” most famously illustrated by the secretary problem. It asks: if you are interviewing candidates sequentially and must decide on the spot whether to hire each one, when should you stop looking? Mathematicians have proven that the best strategy is to reject the first 37 percent of candidates outright, then hire the next one who is better than all the ones you have seen so far.
Notice what this solution does not say. It does not say “keep looking until you find the perfect candidate.” It says stop at a mathematically defined point and commit. The optimal strategy for finding the best option is, ironically, not to search for the best option exhaustively. It is to search strategically and then act decisively.
Simon would have appreciated this result. It is bounded rationality expressed in pure mathematics.
Why Your Brain Agrees With Simon (Even If Your Ego Does Not)
Decades after Simon’s work, psychologists Barry Schwartz and Sheena Iyengar conducted research that gave his theories vivid, human confirmation.
Schwartz, in his book “The Paradox of Choice,” distinguished between two types of decision makers: maximizers and satisficers. Maximizers are the people who always want the best. They compare every option. They research exhaustively. They refuse to commit until they are confident they have found the optimal choice. Satisficers set criteria, find something that meets those criteria, and move on.
The findings were striking. Maximizers, on average, made objectively better choices by some measures. They found slightly better jobs with slightly higher starting salaries. But they were significantly less happy with those choices. They experienced more regret, more anxiety, more doubt. The satisficers, with their “good enough” jobs and their “good enough” salaries, reported greater life satisfaction.
Read that again. The people who found the better option felt worse about it.
This is not a minor footnote. This is a fundamental insight into the relationship between decision making and wellbeing. The pursuit of the best does not just cost more in time and effort. It costs more in psychological peace. The perfectionist does not merely overwork. They undermine their own capacity to enjoy the results of that work.
Iyengar’s famous jam study told a similar story from a different angle. When a grocery store displayed 24 varieties of jam, shoppers were drawn to the display but rarely bought anything. When the store displayed only 6 varieties, sales increased dramatically. More options did not lead to better outcomes. They led to paralysis.
The perfectionist lives in the 24 jam world permanently. Every decision is a wall of options, each one demanding evaluation, each one carrying the threat that some other option might have been slightly superior.
The Perfectionism Trap in Creative Work
Nowhere is Simon’s insight more practically devastating than in creative fields.
Writers who refuse to publish until a piece is perfect do not publish more polished work. They publish nothing. Designers who iterate endlessly do not produce better designs. They produce exhausted clients and missed deadlines. Musicians who record forty takes of a vocal line often end up using take three because it had a quality that obsessive refinement ground away.
There is a well known ceramics class experiment, sometimes attributed to the book “Art and Fear.” A professor divided students into two groups. One group would be graded on quality. They had all semester to produce one perfect pot. The other group would be graded on quantity. They just needed to produce as many pots as possible. At the end of the semester, the best pots came from the quantity group. By making more pots, they learned more, iterated faster, and developed better skills than the group that sat around theorizing about the perfect pot.
This result would not have surprised Simon in the slightest. The quantity group was satisficing at the individual pot level. Each pot just had to be made, not perfected. But that rapid cycle of creation and feedback produced learning that the perfectionist approach could not match.
The Counter Argument (And Why It Only Partly Works)
Now, there is an obvious objection. What about situations where perfection genuinely matters? What about surgery? What about bridge engineering? What about aviation safety?
This is fair. And Simon would not have dismissed it. There are domains where the cost of a suboptimal outcome is catastrophic and the standards must be extremely high.
But notice the subtle distinction. High standards are not the same thing as perfectionism. A surgeon follows rigorous protocols and trains for thousands of hours, but they also know that at some point, you must make the incision. The surgery does not become safer with infinite deliberation. At some point, further delay introduces its own risks. The bridge engineer uses established safety margins, but those margins are themselves a form of satisficing. A bridge designed to handle three times its expected load is not “perfect.” It is “good enough with a buffer.”
True perfectionism, the kind Simon was critiquing, is not about high standards. It is about the inability to accept that any standard has been met. It is the refusal to stop optimizing. And in that refusal lies the irrationality, because the cost of continued optimization eventually exceeds the benefit, and the perfectionist has no mechanism for recognizing when that threshold has been crossed.
What This Means For You, Practically
Simon’s work is not a license to be sloppy. It is permission to be strategic.
It means that when you are choosing a new laptop, you do not need to read every review on the internet. Decide what matters to you. Find something that meets those criteria. Buy it. Use the hours you saved to actually do something with the laptop.
It means that when you are writing an email, the fifteenth revision is almost certainly not fifteen times better than the third. Send it.
It means that in your career, waiting for the perfect opportunity is itself a choice, and it is a choice with costs that compound over time. The person who took the pretty good job three years ago has three years of experience, relationships, and compounding growth that the person still waiting for the ideal role does not.
The deepest irony of perfectionism is this: it presents itself as the highest form of caring. But what it actually reveals is an inability to make decisions under uncertainty. And since virtually every meaningful decision in life is made under uncertainty, perfectionism is not a strength. It is a systematic failure to engage with reality on its own terms.
Herbert Simon saw this more clearly than almost anyone in the twentieth century. He did not win the Nobel Prize for telling people to lower their standards. He won it for demonstrating that the people who understand their own limitations make better decisions than the people who pretend those limitations do not exist.
The satisficer is not settling. The satisficer is the only one playing the game correctly.
And the perfectionist? The perfectionist is still standing in front of the jam display, convinced that the right choice is just one more comparison away, while the satisficer went home twenty minutes ago and is already enjoying toast.
