Mountains of Arizona
Clear 43 Degrees
7:02 a.m.
Early on in my entrepreneurial journey, I bought into the idea that throwing stuff up against the wall hoping something sticks is what we do.
If nothing sticks, you fill up your pale again and start throwing more.
When you do that a LOT, the reality of the situation is that the stuff you’re throwing doesn’t end up being very good.
It can’t be. There’s too much of it.
But that’s what I did for far too long.
And then I figured out I was wrong. Oops.
So I slowed down. I really started thinking about solutions to problems NOT just things I could make to sell.
There’s a HUGE difference between the two:
Making things to sell is about enriching YOU. People do it, but it’s a road to nowhere in the bigger scheme of things.
Making solutions to problems is about enriching EVERYONE. This is the road to a far more fulfilling journey in this bio-mechanical spirit suit we call a “body.”
Creating ART that solves problems, to me, is an even more rewarding path.
I remember the phrase I used to think about when it came to this “do more, do it faster, do it more often!” approach:
“Done is better than perfect.”” Sounds logical doesn’t it? Just get ‘er done!
That might be so. But perfect is also a rather non-productive goal because you spend a huge amount of time for that last 1% of perfection (if you ever get there!) while the world waits with their problems unsolved.
Done might be better than perfect but it’s not better than great.
Great is better than done.
If you’re going to offer solutions to the world that you’ve created, I think GREAT is the place to aim.
Take Apple computer as a simple example. I don’t know exactly how many employees they have but it’s somewhere above 100,000. That’s a lot of human beings who are working.
Apple has about 5 products. That’s it.
100,000 people to support a tiny number of products.
From my perspective, that’s the price you pay for great.
You have to STOP throwing things up against the wall.
Take the Platform Lab. I’ve been offering this same thing for YEARS. But the results that come from it today are nothing like back at the beginning.
I’ve been improving it, refining it, polishing it so that it works better, more often, for more people.
If you view your work as something to get DONE, it’s going to look very different than someone who views their work as something that should be GREAT.
The choice is up to you.