Excellence/Effectiveness

Bobby Gruenewald:

There are several principles that I seem to revisit when talking with pastors. A couple of these are the cost/excellence curve and the cost/effectiveness curve. I wrote about those on swerve almost two years ago, but I think it is worth revisiting today.

If I gave you $100,000, could you make your house or apartment excellent? I imagine that with some careful investments in furniture, paint, etc you could probably do it. If I then gave you another $500,000, could you make it more excellent? How about $5 million? You get the point.

Now, when was it excellent? After the $100k investment? The $500k? Somewhere in-between? Or is it already excellent?

The pursuit of excellence is just that…a pursuit for many and rarely a destination. In nearly every investment we make (our time, money, etc) we can generally always invest more to make something more excellent. The big question is “When is the investment enough?” The good news is that we do have a choice.

Read this post on the cost/excellence and then this one on cost/effectiveness.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are some of the things that guide your decision about when enough is enough?