A Practical Framework for Games and Life
Tolerance-Based Thinking
What is Tolerance?
Tolerance = the allowable variation from a nominal (perfect) dimension.
Example:
A shaft specified as 10.00 mm ± 0.02 mm means anything from 9.98 to 10.02 mm is acceptable.
Parts that must fit, seal, or rotate smoothly (bearings, shafts, mating surfaces) require tight tolerances.
Parts that don’t directly interact, or are cosmetic or structural, can have looser tolerances.
Core Principle
Optimizing loose tolerances does not move you closer to the goal, it just makes the journey nicer.
Be comfortable with tactical imperfection.
Your actions are a means to an end, and the end must be very clear.
Are you optimizing towards the journey in an ego-driven way?
Or achieving the outcome with close to minimum requirements?
Your goal is not to play well, optimize beautifully, or future-proof everything.
Your goal is to reach the goal with close to minimum unnecessary cost.
Marginal Cost vs Benefit
The marginal cost of something can't exceed its marginal benefit.
This can be the case with over-preparation. At some point preparing or planning too far ahead doesn't outweigh the benefit of just taking action and figuring out information, or investing the time you'd have spent preparing actually moving forward and getting to a point that's good enough with loose tolerances instead of perfect tolerances defined by that over-preparation.
Perfection and Tolerance
Perfection is a design choice, not a goal.
Tolerance is the art of stopping improvement at the point where function is already guaranteed.
Bottlenecks and Constraints
Don't optimize past the bottleneck, but add buffers when the requirements aren't certain.
Conclusion
Making tolerances tighter than necessary (aiming for perfection) increases cost with no functional gain.
Tighter tolerances always have a cost.
They are always bad when the marginal cost exceeds the marginal benefit.
The mistake is improving past the functional requirement for the goal at hand.
Perfection is unnecessary; function within acceptable limits is what matters.