“Nothing is invented and perfected at the same time.” – John Ray, Born Nov. 29, 1627.
Are you a perfectionist? Or maybe you're a fiddler, just constantly tweaking and improving, but never publishing or launching?
I feel you. Been there. Used to be that way myself. Oddly, it's a holdover from having been to art school. A painting has to be done to be done.
Writing is different. Marketing is different. Mostly done is often just as good as done. Minimum effective functionality is what you need. What you think it needs to be is frequently far beyond what is necessary to get a result.
And with results, you can THEN finish your thing, and it will end up even better than you could have made it alone.
With feedback from paying clients and eager audiences, you can tailor your thing to better meet what your buyers want and need. And they help do the work for you, if you give them that opportunity. They even LIKE doing it.
And for you, the lessons learned where rubber meets road are invaluable and available in no other way than to release the brake and hit the gas.
We work in marketing. Everything is a test, and a workable draft is the point at which you should publish. Run it, see what happens. THEN improve toward the best version possible. Once you have a better idea of what that is.
Because until you publish, you're just guessing anyway. Why rely on a meticulous guess, when you can make a sorta easy guess and let your people fill in the rest for you? Then just give them what they want most.
Remember that always.
We aren't artists.
We are inventors, and we aren't the kind that keep our inventions hidden.
We are Orville and Wilbur at Kitty Hawk. We are testing openly and often, all the time.
Build on it, improve in iterations. Get as close to perfection as you like, but do it this way instead of alone in your lab.
And hey, you might find perfection isn't all it's cracked up to be. You may discover you don't need it and never did. Good enough can be good enough.
Even better than perfect.