Perfection Is Enemy of the Good

We all want to find that amazing plan / strategy to maximize the value of our work. It can be the best workout plan, best investment strategy, perfect software architecture, etc. The problem, of course, is that the time spent searching is time spent not implementing. And time spent not implementing is time spent not learning from mistakes.

Derek Sivers famously said “If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs.” It couldn’t be further from the truth. We often fall into the trap of believing that we are making progress by gathering more information. But in reality, there is a relatively low ceiling before information arrives at diminishing returns. At which point, action will be far more important.

Back in my early days of becoming a software engineer, I spent months devouring courses and books. I didn’t write any code outside of the course assignments. I thought I was becoming a programming savant. I wasn’t. As soon as I started to create a real project, I couldn’t figure out how to use git properly. No one taught me how to do it in a course. And I kept running into blockers. But through the practice of creating a project from scratch, I learned to overcome all of these problems.

Start doing. You will learn along the way.