Physics of Infinity and Perception of Perfection

We started to learn physics and the first thing that we started reading was Mechanics. Learning the laws of motion, the one thing that I kept on encountering was the concept of 'Infinity'. A lot of problems were being solved using the concept of infinity and my curious mind really wanted to understand what 'infinity' was.

Thanks to my physics teacher, who never got annoyed with any question that I asked him, I got a demo of real world understanding of what infinity would mean in real life.

When I asked him this question, his 18 month baby boy was just playing in the room. He called him, and he got up on his tiny feet and started walking towards him. It was a small drawing room, so he walked the entire length and came and hugged him. Then my teacher got up and went outside the house, which had a very long driveway and went and stood at the end of the driveway. He called his son from there. His son heard him and started to walk towards him. However, in the middle of the way, he just fell and then sat there. He called him a lot of times, but he did not get up and try to cover the remaining distance.

Then my teacher called me, and I got up and went to him!

"Did you understand the concept of infinity?" He asked. I obviously had not understood what he meant.

In the above case, crossing the drawing room was achievable by his son, but the driveway was unachievable for him. Therefore, for his son, his father was standing at infinity. However, for a grown person like me, his father was not at infinity!

The amount of effort, required by his son to reach his father was not justified considering the reward that he would get post reaching there (which in this case was a hug or may be getting on to the lap). However, for me, the effort was too small to even make it a consideration for deciding whether I should get up and cover the driveway.

Fast forward to my work life, I get a lot of people who define one of their strengths as 'I am a perfectionist'. I am generally not able to understand why being a perfectionist is considered to be a great strength. Perfection is not a defined point, which you can achieve. It is similar to 'infinity'!

Let us consider an example, you are talking to your friend over WhatsApp and are busy typing at a rapid pace. In this situation, a few spelling mistakes are fine. A grammatical error or two is fine!

Now let us go back. What would happen in case you used the lawyers approach while chatting with your friend? You would be wasting a lot of time and effort without any substantial gain!

I have seen people spend more than an hour in just drafting an email that they are sending to their immediate boss. Reading the phrases, commas, punctuations again and again to make sure they do not commit any mistake. I have seen developers spending hours in writing comments in a code, just to make sure that the grammar is correct. Brainstorming seasons going into hours where people are discussing just the colour of a small icon (in case you are Google, it makes sense, but if you are a B2B startup, it does not - at least to me).

There are numerous instances where we do not try to understand the ROI of the time we spend doing something.