I was just reading the introduction from Robert Kiyosaki’s excellent book “Before You Quit Your Job” (see left) and one of the headings struck me as being a little odd: “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly”.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for producing quality work all the time. But sometimes it’s better to have your 2nd or 3rd draft as your product, rather than waiting until the product is perfect. There comes a time when you have to say “it’s good enough“. Don’t worry what your mother taught you, in business near enough is often good enough.
Kiyosaki uses Microsoft as an example for just getting a product to market that isn’t perfect but is good enough to partially satisfy the demand. You then work on improving the product and put out an updated version. Now Microsoft isn’t the best example, in my opinion, because you could argue that it crosses the line between good enough and just plain shoddy (just look at all the bugs in Vista), which you never should do. I think Wordpress is a better example. It’s now up to version 2.7.1. Each of its versions have been pretty good, but the next has almost always been a bit better than the previous. Imagine if they didn’t release the product until at least version 3 – the world would certainly be a poorer place.
There are many examples, but all of them lead to this truth:
There comes a time when you have to stop developing and start marketing.
If you wait until your product is perfect, you risk missing your window of opportunity. You risk another company coming in and grabbing the market share you easily could have taken. That’s a whole lotta money that will be in your competitor’s pocket rather than yours. You had the brilliant idea, you found an effective way to solve peoples problems, you deserve to profit from that. But you can screw it up by being a perfectionist, just as you can by being sloppy.
Have a look at your websites “under construction” or books you are working on. Is it good enough to go to market? Good enough to go live? Is it time to stop researching and start writing? Time to stop learning and start doing? So what are you waiting for? Get cracking.
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