Create (And Ship) Something Every Day

Perfectionism is a problem that many of us struggle with, including myself. So we may have great ideas in abundance, yet many of them never see the light of day.

An important distinction to make here: I’m not necessarily talking about new business ideas, at least not in my case. As the co-founder of Zipdo, any idea for a new business I may have goes straight into my business idea backlog, where it belongs. Thou shalt not start multiple businesses at the same time!

There are other ideas, though. Minor improvements to make on a process. A few lines of code that you can write in a single afternoon, saving your team 15 minutes every day from there on out. Sparks of creativity for stuff that will make your life better.

Many times there are good reasons not to pursue an idea. But just as often, there’s not, and you should be getting that “thing” out there, despite your worries about your little product not being in perfect state.

An excellent way for me to deal with this problem has been to not just focus on creating something every day but also on shipping something every day.

This concept forces you to do two things:

• It keeps your perfectionism in check and gets you in the mode of quickly creating, shipping, and receiving feedback. You will ship by the end of the day, whether you are 100% happy with the final result or not.
• It forces you to focus on what is essential about whatever you are creating. Otherwise, you won’t be able to get it out there on time.