The Constellation-class frigate offers a cautionary tale on unsustainable ambition. The New York Times:

In 2020 the Navy had a simple plan to build its next fleet of small warships, the Constellation class: take a European design and build it in America. But the Navy’s constant changes complicated the project. The shipbuilders and supply chain couldn’t keep up. By 2025, the Navy had overhauled 85 percent of the original design — and it still wasn’t final. On Nov. 25, the military canceled the Constellation project. It cost $3.5 billion and has produced zero ships.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance documents many cases where well-meaning one-off requirements—after all, shouldn’t the CHIPS Act mandate child care access for factory construction workers?—congeal enough to slow or stop the original drive for progress. The number of such cases seems to increase with the complexity and diversity of social interests. More constituencies + more veto points + more truly good ideas = more stasis.

Call this Constellation Effect: death by overwhelming good intentions.

It’s good to have non-negotiables. It’s important to have high standards. The difficulty comes in setting standards that are both worthwhile and sustainable. Our public institutions aren’t designed for this kind of triage. They struggle to discern the must-have from the nice-to-have. More often than not, peacetime goals get decided not by urgency but political influence.

But I care more about the personal cases. How often do we give up on a goal or project because we demand too much from ourselves? In my own life, at some point I have:

  • Given up writing because I thought it required publishing and marketing in boring ways (¶1.1).
  • Stopped exercising because I couldn’t sustain an intensive, six-days-a-week regimen.
  • Stopped meditating because I could only sit for ~20 of the 60 minutes I’d planned.

...and so on. I could keep going for pages.

In each case, rather than focusing on what's successful-but-not-ideal, I'd fixate on a goal just out of reach. Again, the requirements—individually and in total—were justifiable. It was an inability to prioritize, to ask what was essentially needed in this moment, that led to failure.

We don’t apply this logic everywhere. No baseball fan judges a team's offense on grand slams alone. Everybody knows that you need base hits to win ballgames. Hell, simply hitting every third ball fair will carry you to the All-Stars.

Yet publicly and personally we struggle with such common sense.

We need less of the optimal and more of the iterated and viable. And we need to learn when “better” makes good enough.