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Ready or not?
“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” – Lorne Michaels
These are the words of Saturday Night Live founder Lorne Michaels. If they would wait for the show to be ready, it would probably never go on. Because it can always be made better.
Better is the enemy of the good. Better ideas kill good ideas. But also, the prospect of a better idea can keep good ideas from shipping.
The art is in finding the balance. Saturday Night Live have found that balance in their weekly schedule. It’s a public schedule. They promise to ship every week. They ship the best work they could come up with in one week. No better. But no worse.
How do you determine that it’s time to ship?
What perfectionists care for
Perfectionists care about not embarrassing themselves. They will go all the way to avoid embarrassment, even if that means not shipping their work.
What that also means is that as a perfectionist you care more for your embarrassment than for your cause.
If you care for your cause, shipping is inevitably part of the caring. It’s even a responsibility. When we genuinely care to make things better, we’d steal the world from better if we didn’t ship. When we care for our cause, we inevitably care for shipping, too.
What gets us into trouble is when we get distracted along the way. When we start caring about what people think. What the critics will say. How many sales we’ll make with this.
Then, we’ve gone off track and stopped caring for the thing we set out to make. Because you can’t care for two things at the same time. They will inevitably get into conflict. When you go all the way into one direction, it’s impossible to go all the way in another direction at the same time.
It’s a double choice. You choose what you care for and you choose to go all the way.
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