"If you improve or tinker with something long enough, eventually it will break or malfunction"
About this Quote
Bloch’s line lands like a shrug dressed up as a law of physics: keep “improving” something and you’ll eventually ruin it. The wit is in the bait-and-switch. “Improve” sounds virtuous, managerial, even heroic; “tinker” sounds playful and harmless. Then comes the punchline certainty of “eventually,” as if entropy is waiting patiently for your next upgrade.
The intent is less anti-innovation than anti-compulsion. Bloch is poking at the modern faith that optimization is synonymous with progress. In the subtext, the real culprit isn’t curiosity but the need to justify meddling: to prove value, to keep hands on the wheel, to never let a system simply be good enough. It’s Murphy’s Law with a psychological add-on: human restlessness is itself a failure mode.
Context matters. Bloch is best known for collecting and refining workplace cynicism into portable aphorisms, and this one reads like a note passed around in an office that’s endured one “small change” too many. It also anticipates today’s software reality: patches that introduce new bugs, product redesigns that break what users liked, “smart” features that add fragility. The quote works because it captures a loop everyone recognizes: the moment when refinement stops serving the thing and starts serving the refiner’s ego, or the organization’s appetite for motion. It’s not a call to stop building; it’s a warning about the fetish of endless iteration without restraint, testing, or humility.
The intent is less anti-innovation than anti-compulsion. Bloch is poking at the modern faith that optimization is synonymous with progress. In the subtext, the real culprit isn’t curiosity but the need to justify meddling: to prove value, to keep hands on the wheel, to never let a system simply be good enough. It’s Murphy’s Law with a psychological add-on: human restlessness is itself a failure mode.
Context matters. Bloch is best known for collecting and refining workplace cynicism into portable aphorisms, and this one reads like a note passed around in an office that’s endured one “small change” too many. It also anticipates today’s software reality: patches that introduce new bugs, product redesigns that break what users liked, “smart” features that add fragility. The quote works because it captures a loop everyone recognizes: the moment when refinement stops serving the thing and starts serving the refiner’s ego, or the organization’s appetite for motion. It’s not a call to stop building; it’s a warning about the fetish of endless iteration without restraint, testing, or humility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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