When Kath Landgren and her colleagues at Stanford, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Colorado-Boulder set out to test an old paradox—should you "shoot for the moon" or avoid letting "perfect be the enemy of the good"?—they discovered that folk wisdom was onto something. But the math revealed a more precise truth: the sweet spot for ambition sits firmly in the middle.
The researchers built a mathematical model to study how people should set their aspirations across nearly every domain of life, from job hunting and entrepreneurship to online dating and politics. The elegance of their finding, published in Physical Review E, cuts through the noise of self-help platitudes. People achieve the best results, on average, when they aim for a satisfaction threshold that is strictly above average—but also strictly finite. Shoot higher than the crowd, yes. But don't aim for infinity.
The research revealed something counterintuitive: being too hard to satisfy carries a steeper cost than being too easy to satisfy by the same margin. In other words, perfectionism hurts more than complacency does. "Conventional wisdom tells people not to settle, but also not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good," Landgren explains. "We wanted to see whether the math actually supports that intuition. It does, with some interesting twists."
The twist lies in context. Not all ambition looks the same depending on the landscape of possible outcomes you're navigating. When outcomes are "rugged"—meaning each attempt is largely independent of the last—or left-skewed (where disasters are bigger than windfalls), people should aim higher relative to the average. But in fields like entrepreneurship, where the distribution is right-skewed and a handful of billionaires pull the average skyward, aiming for that inflated average would be self-sabotage. The model suggests you should actually aim lower in those cases.
Matt Burgess, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, notes the counterintuitive distinction: "When outcomes are left-skewed, like in economic policymaking, where recessions are larger than booms, you should avoid risks, but you should be more ambitious compared to average. It's the opposite in entrepreneurship: You want to take risks but also not be discouraged if you don't become the next billionaire."
Perhaps most relevant to our current moment, the study found that upward social comparison—measuring yourself only against those doing better—is deeply costly. When people judged success purely through that lens, their performance dropped substantially. They became chronically dissatisfied and missed achievable rewards. "Upward social comparison sets us up for disappointment," says Ryan Langendorf, a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder. "It's great to be inspired by others' accomplishments, but focusing only on our most successful peers distorts our view of what's achievable. This is especially true with social media, where we mostly see each other's curated highlight reels."
The researchers tested their model against real-world data spanning online dating, college applications, U.S. economic growth, billionaire wealth, and 2020 swing-state polling. In several cases, actual human behavior closely matched the model's predictions—online daters, for instance, concentrate their messaging on partners just slightly more desirable than themselves, precisely as the mathematics predicted.
The insight is both humbling and liberating: ambition isn't about reaching endlessly upward. It's about knowing your terrain, finding the right height for your goal, and remembering that the people you're comparing yourself to may not be playing the same game you are.