Why are we often so hard on ourselves? We can’t ship anything which is less than perfect. So it stays in your draft section / drawer forever, seen and appreciated by no one.
But this is not how you create value and find your purpose. You find it by opening up and giving to others – may it be art, sharing your knowledge and time to figure things out together.
The brightest businesses and successes are born as something not completely original or breathtaking in scope. The are probably not immediately popular.
Success is born out of simple concepts which are being pursued, consistently and persistently for years and years. If you care. If it’s generous and helpful and worth your journey.
All the big ideas that made a difference follow this pattern.
After so many years I’m still fighting with my urge for perfection. But I know that it’s a never-ending fight. So may this short post be the protest against it. I’ll just post it including a manifesto I think may help you too:
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.
Feross Aboukhadijeh