Jake Anderson explains how to pursue excellence without perfectionism: take imperfect action, gather feedback from your community, iterate quickly, and avoid overbuilding. Scott Perry adds that building in public and learning through doing beats planning in isolation.
Pursue— like pursuing excellence is really the idea here. But when it comes to taking action on something, I have found a lot of value in operating in a feedback loop, right? Like we don't— like a lot of people, and I've made this mistake plenty of times, so I will raise my hand as guilty as charged. But when you're starting a new endeavor or a new business, you have this like, like perspective, like, oh, I've got to have a logo and I've got to have the website and everything's got to be there and done. And before I can ever go and serve anybody. Like, there's— you don't need to put all these barriers in front of you to just start taking action. You know, taking action and really keeping yourself in that state of action and operating through a feedback loop. Go take a little bit of action, play some soft offense, get feedback, and then let that tell you what the next 1 or 2 things that you need to do. You know, you don't have to overbuild. Scott's actually helped me with this recently because I was, you know, and I fall— like I said, I fall in this trap sometimes, and sometimes you need a good coach like Scott to remind you that you know, hey, like, I think right now you look like you're ready right now. Like, why do you need to wait? Why do you need to put things off? So, so I would just remind anybody that is looking to take that first step to just take the step and, you know, remember that it's, it's okay to like, everything has to be done, you know, build with your community, build with your people, let them be part of the process and things will evolve as it should. And a lot of times when you do it that way, you'll look back 6 months ago, wow, I could have never conceived that this is what it would look like back when I started. But that's because you got your people involved in the process. So that would be my piece of advice.
Really appreciate that, Jake. Learning that does not lead to action is useless. And it's— if you can build out loud and in public in a community, then you will get the feedback and the insight and the inspiration you need to iterate more quickly and build something bigger and stronger. And, uh, as I was sharing with Jake when he was overthinking his thing, focus on what's essential and learn how to do that effortlessly before you add any complexity.
Stoics Don't Suppress Emotions, They Do This Instead #stoicism #emotionalintelligence #mindset
