which is better: the best or good enough?

in economics, there is this idea that it is best to spend your money on something until the additional utility you get per dollar stops increasing. that is, until d^2U/dx^2=0. for example, if you could spend $1 on chocolate to get 100 utility, then $2 to get 300 utility, $3 to get 600 utility, and $4 to get 700 utility, then you should spend $3. This is because the 2nd dollar you spend gives you an additional 200 utility, the 3rd dollar you spend gives you an additional 300 utility, but the 4th dollar you spend only gives you another 100 utility. so even though you still get more "happiness" from spending $4 rather than $3, the extra benefit from that 4th dollar isn't as much as the extra benefit from the 3rd dollar, so the 3rd dollar is the last one you should spend.

this concept could be called, doing things 'good enough'. since in some sense, im not really getting the most possible utility out of chocolate if i employ this technique. maybe i could have maxxed out utility from chocolate by spending $10 and getting a maximum of 755 utility, and if i spend one more dollar i go down in utility (since then i have a belly-ache).

it's pretty reasonable, then to see that doing things good enough might be better than doing them to the best possible extent of how good you can do them.

the question that i want to pose is this: does the same argument work in every day to day life? Is doing things good enough (or half-way as my wife likes to call it : P) actually better than doing things the best you can?

I think i tend to employ the technique of doing things good enough. and the reason is that i have a lot of different pulls on my time, and if i focused too heavily on one then the other would suffer. so im constantly trying to find that line where i can stop doing something because the 'dollar' (in this case, just think arbitrary resource unit) i spend could be better used somewhere else. in short, my total utility looks something like a product of the utility i get from each facet of my life, with certain weights. maybe my utility function looks something like this

U(x_1,x_2,...,x_n)=prod_j (x_j^i_j) + L

L is some function which somehow records what has been happening in the last week and thus deforms the real utility function accordingly (ex. a bad week means L is negative, getting cookies means L is positive)

the point is this: you want to try to maximize your total utility, but if you lack on any one thing then you can't really be that happy. so even if you really do well in one aspect of the n things that you consider important, you better not neglect the other n-1 things that you want to do well at, otherwise, you can't be as happy as possible.

i think this idea has been a long time coming so long as i can think of myself as 'me' (this is another idea maybe ill tell you all at some point: how the 'me' changes, is born and dies, to become different 'me's from time to time, usually dying after some big change. i kind of talked about this briefly in the previous post, something like people tend to stay about the same unless something dramatic happens to 'change' them. the changing i call 'death', but it's not really death as in the termination of life, but rather the termination of the personality traits which signify the person as 'me', and the introduction of new traits which are somehow fundamentally different than the old 'me')

i think the reason i thought of this post is a talk i was having with a recruit; it was brought up if i thought that it was good to have a family and be in the dept at the same time. i said absolutely and that it was hard to balance everything at the same time, but totally worth it. of course, being me, i wouldn't make it any other way.