Perfection is a direction, not a destination. Ship first, then improve it with your users—from my column to 3ook.com’s Cantonese AI narration to staying to mend an imperfect society. The crack lets the light in.
In everyday life, you often hear people call themselves “perfectionists” — usually when talking about work that isn’t ready to publish yet, or about being unable to stomach something imperfect.
Like everyone else, I love perfection. But if I had to file myself under a label, I’m probably an “imperfectionist.”
Perfection Is a Direction, the Pursuit a Journey
Owning up to being imperfect — pretty shameless of me, you’ll say. It isn’t. Hear me out.
Take writing. If I claimed every issue of the DHK Post were perfect, that would be the more shameless claim by far. The truth is, while I’ve always published on time, every week, without fail, some pieces I’m not too happy with and some I’m quite pleased with — and even the one I’m proudest of isn’t perfect; you’ll probably still turn up a typo.
But that’s only my own taste, and the paradox is that it’s often out of sync with how readers react. I rather liked last month’s “Dear Algo: What Is an Algorithm?“, yet the response was lukewarm; whereas “The Premier Hub for Mega Events, The Worst Hub for Ticketing” — a piece I didn’t even like, finding it too much navel-gazing — somehow became, of all things, the most “CLS”-ed piece I’ve ever written.
Judging a piece of writing takes in many dimensions. To be perfect is, of course, to do the best on every one of them — but those dimensions are forever in conflict, beyond the author’s control. Which is to say: an author can never wait until something is perfect to publish; he can only do his best. And anyway, missing your publishing cycle in pursuit of perfection is, in itself, imperfect.
Imperfectionism is the realization that “perfection” is a state you can only pursue, never reach — like “infinity” in mathematics: go ahead, write down an enormous number, but any number you can actually write down is finite. Where perfectionism treats “perfection” as the destination, imperfectionism cares more about the process of pursuing it.
Imperfectionism is not a refusal to pursue perfection — still less a pursuit of imperfection. It is striving toward perfection inside a thicket of constraints: limited time, limited resources, conditions beyond your control, invisible red lines.
With all that groundwork laid, you can see why I so often hand in homework riddled with flaws. In my eyes, ship-then-improve beats trying to be “perfect” before you ship; and more importantly, only this way can the audience take part and collaborate, finding consensus along the way. To me, the process of public participation matters far more than the result of going it alone. As Audrey Tang often quotes, from the Canadian poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen: the crack is how the light gets in.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.— Anthem, Leonard Cohen
Letting AI Learn from Its Mistakes
Imperfectionism isn’t the reason my work falls short (though it does make a handy excuse now and then) — it’s my worldview, and it shows up in every corner of life.
On June 16 last year, “3ook.com,” the “third-generation bookstore,” launched. Plenty of people found it pretty crude: a thin catalog, few features, no companion mobile app — all sorts of shortcomings, in short. Even so, we kept our rhythm and shipped on schedule.
Fifty weeks — that is, 25 development cycles — later, 3ook.com’s catalog has grown enormously; we’ve added personal voice artists and many other features, and released apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, even macOS. We’re still a hundred thousand miles from perfect, but the point is that we’ve taken many steps in perfection’s direction.
A perfectionist would argue we should have waited until the catalog was large enough, the features complete, every platform supported, before launching — the way Apple, that supposed paragon of enterprise, surely polishes a product to perfection before release. But don’t forget: we’re not Apple. And besides, the iPhone couldn’t even do 3G when it launched in 2007; iOS 26 was bumped to 26.1 not long after release; the Vision Pro still comes with an external battery to this day. All of which goes to show that even Apple — which carries perfectionism to its limit — ships products that, the moment they land, are not perfect.
What’s more, even if we were willing to push 3ook.com’s launch back a year, that wouldn’t mean we could make a perfect product. Only by keeping an imperfect 3ook.com running can the team watch usage data, gather user feedback, and talk with publishers and independent authors inside a living ecosystem — gradually adding the right features and cutting the useless ones, step by step, feeling out alongside the community what a “third-generation bookstore” should look like.
Don’t take this for high-sounding soft promotion; let me give a concrete example.
3ook.com’s pitch is “giving books a voice.” Audiobooks are expensive to produce — the privilege of bestsellers — but by driving costs down with generative AI, 3ook.com lets any work be read aloud in a voice artist’s, or the author’s own, voice. Without market scale, having humans read niche works line by line can’t recoup the cost; reading in a “niche language” like Cantonese is harder still. And so our centerpiece is Cantonese narration.
But precisely because Cantonese isn’t mainstream — where AI narration in English and Mandarin runs very near 100% accurate — AI reading Cantonese text carries more flaws. Even at 99% accuracy, a 1% misread rate means a 100,000-character text gets read wrong a thousand times. Thick-skinned as I am, I can’t wave that away with a glib “imperfectionism.” More awkward still, the misread character is sometimes crucial — for instance, the 區 in author Au Ka-lun’s surname (read “Au”) getting voiced as the 區 in 區塊鏈, “blockchain” (read “keoi”). How could I face this bestselling author?
Happily, AI narration added a dictionary feature last month: whenever a misread turns up, you can add an entry to correct it. To continue the example, I’ve already added a line to the dictionary:
"區家麟": "(au1)家麟"explicitly specifying that, in this context, 區 is read “au1,” correcting the AI’s misreading. 3ook.com is fully open-source: not just team members, but any technically inclined user — any Hongkonger devoted to preserving Cantonese — can take the initiative to add an entry to the dictionary hosted on GitHub and file a pull request. Quite literally, this lets the AI learn from its mistakes, sharpening its pronunciation one character at a time.
It isn’t hard to imagine: had we waited for Cantonese narration to be perfect before launching, the result wouldn’t have been a delay of a year or two — it would have been never launching at all, because it would never be good enough. Real users using it and taking part is the precondition for continuously improving and refining the product. Setting aside my ego and shipping flawed Cantonese narration did draw its share of mockery; but every criticism is a user taking part, and every correction, in turn, becomes nourishment for the product.
Inching Forward Against Forces Beyond Control
In the end, imperfectionism seeps into my choices about life, too.
Where I live, justice is wanting and freedom under pressure — even writing an article means looking over your shoulder. Starting over in a democratic, free, at least outwardly more “perfect” system is a reasonable path. I have no wish to judge that choice. And yet: more than a result reached in a single leap, I value the process of taking part. I would rather stay on this imperfect, even ugly, patch of land — and within the shadow of forces beyond my control, with small but forward steps, keep making myself and society a tiny bit better.
A crack — that’s where the light gets in.
p.s. “The New Boy Who Cried Wolf”: Ever since I finished the IBO (Initial Book Offering) of “Attack on Freedom” late last year, I started writing the book. I’ve told people several times that I was “almost done with the first draft” — but the manuscript dragged on and on, and my words turned into lies. Early last week I again told the 100 co-publishers I was “almost done with the first draft,” and then, a few days later, I actually finished it.
p.p.s. No need to spell it out: the first draft of “Attack on Freedom” isn’t perfect. The co-publishers are reading the trial edition right now — letting the light into the text.
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