No, your work will never be perfect.

And honestly...nor should it be.

👋🏼 Hey, I’m Anna! I’m a founder and operator in an ongoing relationship with writing. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share business, career and life lessons that I’ve learned over years of trying hard, failing often, dusting myself off and improving until I succeed.

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Shot by Giuseppe Morello, via Pinterest.

For many years, I thought that creating anything new involved following a few simple steps:

Step 1: Have an idea.

Step 2: Work on it until it takes shape.

Step 3: Spend forever perfecting every detail until I feel good about it.

Step 4: Release it into the world.

Step 5: Pour myself a dirty martini and bask in my success.

But at the ripe old age of 25, I learned that businesses and careers aren’t built this way.

At the time I was working for one of Australia’s largest retailers, and my manager was about to go on maternity leave. One day shortly before she was due to clock out, I was abruptly called into the founder’s office to receive some news. Instead of finding a replacement for her role, they were giving me the opportunity to step up and lead a massive project that I was neither qualified nor prepared for - delivering a ‘store of the future’. Within the space of five minutes, I’d been plucked from relative office obscurity and hurled into leading a big company initiative.

I knew I had to come up the learning curve quickly and so decided then and there to reorient my entire life around work. I spent the next months flying all over the world to gather inspiration and ideas. I built project plan after project plan. I worked with hundreds of people across the business and over-prepared for every meeting. I agonised over the smallest details. After a year of hardcore commitment, I emerged from my retail bubble - the store was finally open.

On launch day the feedback came in thick and fast; most of it good, some of it constructive, some of it excruciatingly bad. Every time I received harsh criticism, it felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the collective effort of our team. I felt burnt out and broken, and it showed.

A few days later the founder pulled me aside saying, “regardless of the feedback, know that you’ve moved the entire business forward. But also remember that it doesn’t end here. Let’s move on to version two.”.

That day I realised that even though I’d poured my heart and soul into trying to deliver the perfect project, it was just the start. There was life beyond the deadline. My work had only just begun.

There’s no such thing as a finished product.

When you put something new into the world - whether it be a business, product, service, concept, campaign, artwork, experience, or creative output - the juicy part comes after you’ve launched it, not before.

Beforehand, you’re working to a hypothesis. You think people will either love it or like it, and you hope to high heavens that they won’t hate it. But only afterwards you learn if your assumptions were correct, and you get feedback to trigger new ideas, rapid improvement and growth.

The truth is that when you launch something, you’re at the starting blocks not the finish line.

Most of us know this, but most of us also wait until the thing we’re working on is fully buttoned up before we put it out into the world. We cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s before anyone sees a thing. We prod and prune and tweak and refine and recreate and adjust and agonise and obsess and change until we inevitably start to question and doubt and spiral and second guess until we lose steam.

But herein lies a massive missed opportunity: by trying to be perfect, we miss the chance to test, iterate and evolve in a way that will ironically take us closer to perfection than anything we’ve done before.

That’s why instead of aiming for perfect straight up, we should aim for good enough instead.

When is ‘good enough’, good enough?

When it comes to starting something from scratch, there are two totally opposite schools of thought:

Option A: Don’t rush. It’s a marathon not a sprint. Take your time and get it right.

Option B: Hurry up. Get it out the door so you can get real world feedback. You can only iterate on something that’s been released into the wild.

In my experience, both of these arguments hold up in the court of life. I never want to rush and put something shitty into the world. I enjoy refining my work so it reflects my skillset and expertise. But I also know the value of sharing work quickly so it can be validated. Shipping quickly has, more than once, prevented me from creating the wrong thing in the first place.

The way I choose between Option A or B is to know my standards and what’s really at stake.

Here’s how I think about it:

• If something’s high stakes, my standards of work are high. If I’m putting together a proposal and have one shot to land a deal, I’m going to finesse the bejesus out of that deck until it’s a 9.5 out of 10.

• If something’s low stakes, my standard of work lowers to ‘good enough’. When I first launched my website it housed a home page and a blog. That’s it. I knew that something was better than nothing, and so I dropped my standard to a 6 or 7 just so I could get it up.

Adjusting my standards based on what’s at stake has been hugely helpful in helping me get stuff out the door. But even on the highest stakes projects my standards never reach a 10 out of 10.

Let me explain why.

The opportunity cost of a 10 out of 10 mindset is fatally high. I’ve seen this up close through many years working of with founders and solopreneurs: I’ve seen freelancers lose clients because they haven’t launched their services due to fear, I’ve met writers forgo the opportunity to have impact because they need to do ‘just one more pass’ on their work, and I’ve met e-commerce founders miss out on sales because they’re waiting until the time to launch is ‘just right’.

But no time is ‘just right’. You’ll never feel ready and it’ll never feel perfect. That’s because ready and perfect are a lie. They’re a figment of our imagination, a destination that exists only in our minds.

Better early than late.

Getting something up and out that’s ‘good enough’ > making it perfect and keeping it all inside.

When I realised this, I started lowering my standards as a strategy. I gave myself permission to become a 7 or 8, and instead of my world crumbling down, I’ve experienced serious growth instead.

These days, if people take a sledgehammer to my work, I take it as positive signal. It’s a sign that I’m moving my entire life forward.

In life, they say ‘better late than never’.

But I say, ‘better early than late’.

First good, then great.

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