The sly and expensive cost of things being only slightly crap.

In 2004 Dr Daniel Gilbert published a research paper with the objectively magnificent title of, “The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad”.

It’s only 4 pages in length and should be required reading across the board.

The underlying premise was this - sometimes you’d be better off if things got worse.

Welcome to the Region Beta Paradox.

It’s O.K.

Good enough.

Could be worse.

As an aging long distance runner (and a man) I’m stereotypically a poster child example of why worse in the short term will probably be better in the long term.

It starts as a niggle, progresses to a strain and then doggedly loiters around in that halfway house between being something we can ignore and something that actually requires intervention from a professional. So we ignore it. It’ll probably go away, or sort itself out, it’s not that bad, could be worse, feels a bit better today. Until eventually it matriculates into a full blown catastrophic injury and I’m now skulking around the house an intolerable bag of misery waving a calendar of cancelled races.

I would have been better off if my ‘niggling injury’ had progressed quickly into something worse, transgressed a critical threshold and pushed me to take action, get it sorted and avoid the patently obvious (to everyone else) outcome of a race-ending-grade injury.

If you want a corporate example look no further than Sarah Tavel’s concept that ‘7s kill companies’ The idea being that 4s are easy to spot, they get performanced managed all the way to the parking lot. Conversely 9s are getting the corner office and stacking bonuses. But 7s are deadly. They show enough glimpses of promise to keep around even though they never really deliver the goods. Not bad enough to fire but not good enough to promote - all the while occupying a seat that could have had a 9 in it. You would have been better off if they were just out and out terrible from the start.

It’s the soft smothering cushion of the mediocre, of the marginally acceptable, the somewhat tolerable. We are creatures of habit, who love the comfort of the familiar and are rarely in a hurry to risk a setback or loss or even a certain degree of inconvenience if we can just grin and bare it. After all, it’s not that bad.

Then you wake up one day and ten years have gone by.

You never reached the critical threshold that triggered action.

Now it’s not a niggling injury or mediocre performance we’re talking about. It’s the lost opportunity of years - that could’ve been filled with learning, progress, adventure, all manner of 9s.

“We endure things that are not so bad. It stops us from taking action. The paradox is that you would be better off if things were worse, because then you would take action” - Dr Daniel Gilbert

Why is it called the Region ? Paradox?

It stems from a simple graph in the original paper but the gist is this.

Let’s say you moved to a new town and decided that anything within a mile of your home you would walk to but anything further you would bike to. If you graph out the distance against time there is a large region (?) where whilst a point is further from you, and requires the effort of bike riding, you would actually get there sooner than if you walked to somewhere closer. The fact that a point is inconveniently further away would actually result in you getting there sooner - reversing the normal relationship between distance and time.

(I provided the link to the original paper earlier, so if you want to dig deeper into monotonic and nonmonotonic behaviour and why being able to envision the future is both a blessing and at times a hinderance - go for it. Otherwise, I read it so you don’t have to, but you can still quote it at parties and meetings now, seeming all intellectual and wise)

So what do I do about it.

Knowledge is power.

If the frog just got out of the water as it warmed up rather than waiting for it to get intolerable he’d be frolicking in the marshes.

You don’t have to make things worse to trigger the critical threshold for action. Know that the mild discomfort of the mediocre, the not too bad, is a potential death knell to opportunity, growth, even survival.

Take the action early.

Deal.

Get it seen to, make the move, cut the loss, take the risk.

And beware of the peculiar longevity of things not so bad.