Perfect Prevents Progress
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The idea that perfectionism has been preventing progress has been around for a long time:
“The best is the enemy of the good.”
– Voltaire
“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
– Confucius
I think we can take this one step further by defining what is meant by good. To me, good means progress, and progress is everything. It is not the destination, after all, it is the journey.
When looking at any type of success it is not gained overnight. Instead, success is achieved after countless attempts and endless iterations. The overnight successes you hear about have in reality been slaving away in their basement for years before success hit. I truly believe putting in the work and continuously improving is the only true way to be successful, and most importantly to provide as much value as possible to others. When I think of any of my projects the perfect version of my first iteration was never as good as a less-than-perfect version of the Nth iteration.
The books The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin, Steal like an artist, and Show your Work ,both by Austin Kleon. All describe the importance of just getting out there and letting go of the need to be perfect. Instead, just focus on providing value to others.
If you count success by how much your item, blog post, or video, can help others and multiple that potential by how many people it actually helps it becomes very apparent that there is a trade-off and a balancing point. For example, if we look at it as a Return on Effort Score (ROE) which equals the impact it has on others (Value) multiplied by how many people it impacts (Volume) you can see the impact on waiting for perfect.
Value (Percent of Perfect your product is) * Volume (the number of people impacted) = Return of effort
Return of Effort
You can see, from the above graph, that waiting to get to 100% (AKA perfect) has no impact if it doesn’t get shipped and no one is actually helped. Likewise, if you do something 95% as good as it can be done and it helps 1,000 people that return is infinitely more than no one being helped. Finally if by getting something to 90% as good as it can be, you can have 10X the impact by helping that many more people. The reason this math works is that the amount of effort increases exponentially for every extra amount of perfect that is revised in your product. So even though the value is more for each person it is not sufficiently better to justify the amount of extra time that is taken to achieve it.
The secret to success and helping others is to improve your baseline so that 90% of what you are capable of is better than much of the market. This is done over years and years of work, persistently honing your skills and improving your understanding of the market and what they actually care about. Far too often we see people spending countless hours on a feature that no one else cares about.
By focusing on improving what your 90% is you can never go wrong, and the way to do that is by producing and learning. Far less is learned by getting one product to 100% (or more realistic zero products) than by making five products that are 95% or 20 items that are 90%. The base that each iteration is built on allows each successive product to be better than the previous with even less effort. That makes it much more beneficial to constantly improve on your skills instead of spending all your time on one product attempting to make it perfect.
I know this firsthand and it is something I constantly fight with. With this website, I have a very difficult time hitting publish on each blog post because I am by no stretch of the imagination a good writer and this is multiplied by feeling like an imposter. I would classify myself as below average writer (I am an Engineer after all). This makes me want to overcompensate by spending hours reviewing and revising each post; however, I decided that is pointless and will not help anyone. Instead, I am focusing on the content and trusting that each post I publish will improve my skills and hopefully my writing will become easier for the reader to follow.
There is no end goal as to what will be good enough and when a person will feel secure in sharing. That is one of the biggest problems with being a creator, the goal posts are always moving. As your skills level up your expectations increase as well. This means that you will never feel like your product is ready, and you can get stuck in the trap of showing nothing and helping no one.
Do not let Perfect Prevent Progress if anything of these applies please ship your work:
Competition: If you have the desire to compete don’t wait until you are “ready” just sign up and have fun.
Fitness: If you want to join that new class, or the new gym, don’t wait until you are in better shape just join.
Business Concept: Don’t wait until every idea is perfectly ironed out with a plan in place. Because no one plan survives first contact with the enemy. Just start it.
Website: Don’t focus on everything being perfect before publishing and sharing it. Setup the basics, share it, and continuously improve it. (PS now after typing this I need to share this website with my family and friends).
Product: The market doesn’t need every single feature, they do not need everything to be perfect. Just solve a problem and ship it.
We are all Works In Progress so just SHIP YOUR WORK and make the next one better.
Summary
Focus on improving each iteration
Improve your skills so your 90% is better than the majority of everyone else
Put your work out there and get feedback on what people actually care about
Perfect Prevents Progress
PS comment below on what you have been waiting to be perfect before sharing.
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