Shawn Buttner explains why perfectionism kills projects and proposes the 80-90% rule: ship when it works and doesn't crash, even if features are unfinished. Early release brings real feedback and breaks the cycle of endless refinement.
High performance coach. And we start your day with good habits, good intentions, good beliefs, so that you can rock the day. Now, today we're going to be talking about shipping it. And what does that mean? Well, in my previous career in tech, it just means get the product out into the world, right? And maybe you've had a project that's dragged on forever, you that you wish would just end, that you could get out there, but you're trying to make it perfect. Or maybe you've been, you know, just so frozen on thinking through everything that could go wrong or everything that needs to get done that instead of making decision right now to act, you put it off. And that, you know, we'll do it tomorrow, we'll do it next week, we'll do it next month, we'll do it next year. And the project never gets launched. So in order to deal with that, we have to understand first that perfection makes misery, especially if you go for extended periods without feedback or results or learning. Right? And it's not to say that we shouldn't aim and strive for perfection, but the idea is we shouldn't let perfection get in the way of our progress. And how do we progress? We learn, we try, we figure things out. And you can't get the full experience unless you move the thing forward and you are consistent in updating and shipping your products, your projects, the important things in your life. So I just wanted. Quick story. When I was working at Apple, when we would release code, we always would talk about, was it quality enough to launch? So you want to hold things to a high quality. I. My general rule of thumb that I developed in my years in tech is about 80% to 80 to 90% of the functionality is there and you're good as long as it doesn't crash, as long as it doesn't break in unexpected ways. But if you got it mostly there, and there's a few things you need to figure out, it's really worth getting it in front of people that don't have your perspective. They don't have the mind of the engineer that's trying to focus on a very specific problem. But we'll be like, oh, I expected it to do this. You're like, oh, I didn't even think of that. So we need to go back and update and get into this iterative learning loop, right? That's essentially what we want to do. We want to get out there, be on it, tested, we want to say what didn't we know? What were our assumptions that are now challenged? What are Things that we need to do to make this an even better experience for our customers or on the project. What do we need to do to make sure that we, we launch it better next time or we have these incremental improvement efforts? Really hard to say. So it's really important that we are continually acting, continually moving things forward and continually pushing things out because learning is fun. And if you don't think learning is fun, I need you to believe that learning is fun, folks. But I don't think you'd be here watching a video from a coach if you weren't at least a little bit interested in your continual education. So the alternative to this iterative learnings, iterative launch, this iterative shipping it, iterative getting it out in the world is that you spend so much brain power and emotion and energy and sweat and tears trying to get everything perfect that when you launch it and it doesn't go well, you, you are completely crushed emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually. Like, you start to question if there's a higher power. If you've been working on something for two years, you launch it and nobody loves it, right? And so the idea is you want to get that sooner in the process. Like, oh, people don't like this little bit of this. Let's fix this part, make it great before we move on. So when you create iterate so you can deliberate yourself your projects from the traps of perfection. Okay guys. So that said, if you need help trying to get something shipped or to make sure you're doing the right projects in itself, you could always go to Sean Butner.com backslash coaching to qualify and apply for a free one on one strategy session where we can talk about the projects going on in your life and what you might do to help make the decision quicker to ship it, what you might do to let go of some of the beliefs or some the of some assumptions you have with it. A lot of people find it really powerful and I love doing this. So make sure you go to SeanButter.com coaching to get signed up for that strategy session. Okay guys, I'll see you tomorrow. Same time, same place, 10:00am Pacific Standard Time. We're starting today with the coach. Go out there with more joy, more personal growth and more impact in your communities. Folks, see you.
