Don’t criticize something when it’s all you have

People become victims of their own impossibly high standards.

In an effort to avoid the good, they put the bar for quality so high that they never do anything at all. Great becomes the enemy of done.

It’s like the insecure developer who overreacts to every piece of immediate user feedback and micro optimizes himself into oblivion. Or the quantitative analyst who constantly adapts to every minor variation in her metrics, which prevents her from ever making the big bets that have the potential to change everything.

Look, it’s understandable that you want to put your best foot forward, but you’ll never impress anyone by putting no foot forward.

Here’s a helpful mantra to remember:

Imperfectly done now is better than perfectly done never.

Reminds me of my old boss. He was always complaining about how our advertising agency didn’t publish enough editorial pieces. Fair enough.

But the moment we started writing, he red penned every goddamn word within an inch of its life. And it took weeks just to ship a single article. After the first few attempts, our motivation for writing diminished to nonexistence.

We wanted to tell the guy, look, don’t criticize something when it’s all you have.

Great had become the enemy of done.

Proving, that even if we are going in the wrong direction, we can still create momentum. Even if our actions aren’t leading us directly to our goals, we can still generate energy.

Ultimately, the bias should be on output. Volume over accuracy. Quantity over quality. We can always course correct later.

For now, just get something up on the board. Put the wheels in motion.

Keep the moving the story forward.

Are you becoming a victim of your own high standards?