Embrace Error

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Embrace Error

A far too common mistake that people make is to avoid or delay doing things because they're worried about getting it wrong or making it less than perfect.

I'm releasing a book (you may possibly have heard me mention this a few times). It's currently on pre-release in the Amazon store and it comes out on January 7th. Why do it that way? It's an experiment. It's probably wrong or at least sub-optimal. But at least it will be published before the week is out.

And that's the bit that actually matters

Perfect Is The Enemy of Good

The golden mean can be applied to a lot of things in life, but it most definitely applies here. It is far too easy to endlessly tweak, adjust or study in the pursuit of perfection rather than releasing something because it is good.

I've done my best with my book. I've drafted and re-drafted. I've had other people read and point out errors. I workshopped the cover going through multiple revisions of that.

It's not perfect. In fact I guarantee there are still typos in it somewhere and there's some passages that good be improved. But, I think it's good enough. It's possible I'm wrong in my judgement on that of course. Maybe it's not good enough. There's only one way to find out though isn't there?

And it's time to move forward. If I aim for perfection I will be stuck at this point indefinitely. I won't be the first author to put out a less than stellar first publication. It might even teach me something.

To Err Is Human

Making mistakes is how human beings learn. Watch a young child for a while. They spend an awful lot of time doing things wrong.

By refusing to finish, or in some cases even to start, because of a fear that the results won't be good enough you're actually stopping yourself from getting better. Yes that's a rather trite and obvious thing to say but it strikes me that we tend to forget it a lot.

If you look at your average day you probably spend as much time (or more) getting things wrong as you do getting them right. The thing is that most of those mistakes are made in private. No one sees them because you fix them before you send out the document you were working on.

Intellectually we know it's okay to get stuff wrong, but we really don't want people to see us do it. And certainly it would be better if we were able to identify and fix all our mistakes, make everything perfect, before we shared it with the world. But we can't because unless we share it we have no way of learning what a lot of our mistakes actually were.

But What If I Get It Wrong?

What if you do? Of course I personally am never wrong, but everyone else is all the time, and they seem to survive the experience.

There are certain things where it's probably best to be extremely cautious. Anything involving high voltage electricity for example. Or expensive car parts. But if your project is largely electronic take a moment to assess what the real risk is.

Let's say my book The Wolves of West Virginia turns out to be full of typos that I (and several other readers) failed to spot. Well it's possible that some readers will be unhappy. In which case they can probably get their money back from Amazon.

Or maybe they complain to me in which case I have the opportunity to fix those typos and release an updated version to benefit them and everyone else. That's the nice thing about electronic projects, they can always be fixed. Errors aren't permanent.

Maybe I'll have lost a reader for life though. Only one chance to make a first impression and all that. Well, that's possible, but I wouldn't have had a chance at that reader in the first place if I hadn't published. And let's be a little realistic here. There are a lot of people out there. There's always someone else to make a first impression on. If that reader really is so unforgiving they won't give you another chance, move on.

And in the mean time maybe that one guy didn't forgive me, but 5 other readers did. So when I release the second book, I'm 5 readers up on where I would have been.

Fail Fast

That's a phrase you often here applied to Silicon Valley startups (and sometimes larger beasts like Google). I'm not advocating deliberately doing a bad or even half-assed job. What I am suggesting is giving it a good effort and then moving on to the next project.

Apply what you've learned, hell go back and fix the things you can in the original work (remember it's electronic, it can always be changed), but above all move forward.

I'm talking about writing here, but the same philosophy applies to software, artwork, photography and many other types of projects. I'm a risk averse sort of person, but it's important to recognize when a risk really isn't actually a risk.