Horseshoes🐎, Hand Grenades💥, and the Pareto Principle

Hello to all the nice people out there! 👋

Have you ever heard the phrase, “almost only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades?”

For example, imagine your fundraiser goal is $50K, and you raise $48K. Someone might shrug and say, “Well, we’re almost there.” Cue the cowboy with a handlebar mustache in the corner: “Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades!”🐎💥

In the game of horseshoes (apparently), throwing the horseshoe close to the target still counts. And well, in hand grenades, you can figure it out. 😅

This phrase has its place. Nobody wants a half-cooked chicken or an unfinished appeal letter. But if we're not careful, we can ourselves become perfectionists.  And perfectionism kills productivity.

Take Jack, a successful Amazon seller I know. Early in his career, he obsessed over perfecting every detail on his product pages and tweaking PPC rates for hours. And guess what? Nothing sold.

Then, Jack learned about the Pareto Principle—the idea that 80% of outcomes come from just 20% of efforts. Named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, this principle has been applied everywhere, from business strategy to personal productivity.

(I know you’re gonna trust Wikipedia even though you know you shouldn’t, so here: Pareto Principle. 80% of his peas came from 20% of his plants. Now you know.)

Armed with this knowledge, Jack ditched perfectionism. He spent an hour designing product inserts and stopped. He wrote descriptions that were "good enough."

And he started selling.  He started selling a lot.

A close mentor once told me he wished the word “perfect” would be removed from the dictionary. Because the truth is, you’ll never get everything perfect. That doesn’t exist.

It’s the same with NPOs.  I worked with a very successful fundraiser this past summer—let’s call him Joe. Joe manages twenty initiatives across a dozen locations (four of which he opened in the past year!). 

After sending him a first draft, our follow-up meeting went basically like this: “OK, Danny, this copy’s good. Tweak it like a, b, c, and then we’ll send it to the graphic artist.”

And all of our projects went like that. I wrote calmly, knowing the client’s attitude. And the writing came out on target.  I produced more deliverables for Joe than for any other client, with by far the least “mulling over” involved. 

No wasting time. No waiting for the “right” words to appear. No getting distracted from his true calling—helping more and more people around him. 

Let’s keep the “horseshoes and hand grenades” line handy for when we need it, but also know when not to let “perfect” get in the way of “good.”

Have a great day, everyone!

Danny ✌️

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