Iterate to perfection

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] I think the desire to do something perfectly often stops us from being able to do it. . Think about it. We start planning something and we come up with a strategy. Let's say it's for a piece of code and how we're gonna tackle it. And sometimes we spend a long time doing that and everything is going great in our heads.

[00:00:42] Sometimes in my younger years, I remember I would spend like half the time planning and then I would start writing. or creating the thing that I was creating and I would run into a problem that I had not anticipated, and [00:01:00] now half the plan is out the window because I have to change my strategy and I might be tempted to go back to the drawing board or something, or just trying to figure it out right now, except now I have 50% less time to try to figure out how to do this well.

[00:01:20] There is that famous story about the professor who gave, you know, half the class a task to come up with as many pots or something as they could and the other half of the class had to like make only one, but make it as well as they could. And the best pots came out from the side of the class that was creating a lot more of them versus the one who sat there planning and then just made one.

[00:01:55] And I think that instead of trying to [00:02:00] make something perfect from the get go, if we gave in to the concept of experiments and trial and error, that would probably serve us all better. But how do you do that when you're at work? Or you need to create something for a client, right? You don't always have lots and lots of tries that you can experiment with before you deliver something.

[00:02:30] You often have just one or two tries. So how do you take that philosophy and apply it to the very real world application of work? And what I've been thinking about is that if you have 10 hours to do something, I think if you spend an hour doing some pre-planning, and I'm calling it pre-planning for a reason,

[00:02:59] I think that's a [00:03:00] useful time in your project. It's a good use of your time. Then I think you should try to put that plan in action. Whatever you figured out, try to put it in action and as you create or do the thing that you planned on doing, you will inevitably come across hurdles or come up with ideas or thoughts that you hadn't thought of before, which are triggered by you doing the thing, and then you should plan as you go.

[00:03:33] Plan the next little bit. Then do that. Maybe some other ideas will come. I think if we plan in iterations, we can still maybe, you know, fulfill our desire to plan and make something great the first, in the first get-go. But do it in a way that is sustainable and makes a lot more sense in the real world.

[00:03:58] And I was thinking about how this makes so [00:04:00] much sense for goals as well, right? Instead of planning for the whole year, I mean, have a plan, but instead of planning for the whole year, try to plan for smaller sections. so that you can adjust as you go. Maybe that means a monthly goal or a quarterly goal, but being able to iterate as you go will always, almost always lead to something closer to perfection.

[00:04:28] Then trying to be perfect and figure everything else from the beginning, instead, you know, my brain is going really fast today. But that's what I'm thinking about right now.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.