A while ago, I warned about avoiding analysis paralysis and suggested that rather than taking the time to perfect your product, to push it out the door and see what reactions it gets; then tweaking it. About trusting your gut. There was some great discussion over my post on Hacker News and one comment really stood out to me.
I like to call this the difference between “Ready, Aim, Fire” and “Ready, Fire, Aim”.In the past, I would never “fire” before “aiming”. I knew all too well that the cleanup would take longer than the up-front planning would have.
Today, I’m not so sure. Just getting something done provides feedback you didn’t have before. That feedback could drastically change your plans.
How do you know when to Aim before Firing or Fire before Aiming? Use your best personal judgment. If Firing before Aiming doesn’t get you killed, it’s often the better alternative.
I learned this in producing my own site, Football Bio. It’s not online because I allowed myself to take too long getting it released, and by the time it was finally “perfected” I would see a shift in the trends and market demands making my previous, fleshed-out product obsolete.
This “Ready. Fire. Aim.” approach relates closely to what is called “satisficing.” Simply put, satisficing is approaching a problem or situation and resolving to make the decisions which feel the best, but take the least amount of time or resources to execute. As Wikipedia defines it:
Satisficing is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution. A satisficing strategy may often be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculus.
This way, you can iterate more decisions from there and come to a better solution than if you spent all your time trying to solve the first problem perfectly from the start. Another similar approach is the Japanese philosophy of constant improvement, called “kaizen.”
Football Bio very well could have been obsolete from the start, but the point is that I took too long to figure this out. If I had released a simplified and narrowly focused version earlier, I would have either been embraced and been able to grow the site, or shooed away to turn to my next project sooner, saving me a fair amount of time and money.
This mentality relates to more than just business as well. Sometimes the potential outcomes of a situation may frighten you, or you may want to know every option that is in front of you, but this over-analysis blocks you from trusting what you feel is right. People who worry a lot tend to over-analyze things from what I’ve noticed.
It would greatly benefit anyone to learn how to be amazingly resilient rather than calculatingly perfect.
