Perfection requires attention to detail.
However attention to detail doesn’t mean perfection.
You can acknowledge the details and realise it’s not quite perfect & work with it.
Just look at iPhone / iPad releases. We are amazed at what is delivered each year, yet if you internally at Apple you know what’s just around the corner. They pay attention to detail yet realise it’s not quite perfect.
The absolute barebones you need to test an idea.
Even better if you can get someone else to pay for it. Although when it is the bare minimum chances are you can fund it yourself.
Also it’s a million times easier to sell the vision when you’ve got the minimum viable product. Much much easier.
Is that it happens anyway. Whether or not you want it to.
The benchmarks & comparisons happen subtlety, subconsciously.
Even when you don’t think it’s happening it does.
That’s part of the problem with the brain drain, the top people who are normally benchmarked against, leave the country. So the benchmark changes, it lowers. So suddenly what people are comparing against is a lower performer. As a result the whole status quo drops.
Jack Daly gave me a practical example when I talked with him, offering incentives (like iTunes gift cards) to those who won, the real reward was lifting the average performance of everyone.
Startups create the new ideas, systems & validate the market need. They pave the way.
Then at one point they become a big company, that value is mass market, so they begin trading it off. Systemising it, maximum customers. They bring the scale & the behaviour that scale requires.
They are completely different, work with it.
I’ve just kicked off another project in the last few days.
It’s not built around fast, it’s built around a little bit of change each day. 10/15 minutes.
It takes a little longer to get started, but once you’re going, it starts to snowball. Real fast.
It also forces you to focus on what’s important, best way to achieve that & breaking down big goals into small digestible parts.
If someone has done it before, find out what they did, take it on board and start iterating. It’s the exact model we did at College, find some good ideas, reference them, link to our own. How come we don’t do this in business?
Hire smarter (than you) people, learn from them, decode others ideas, break them down, rebuild them.
The key source of dissatisfaction or frustration? It’s when we swap from creating to managing.
We’re not creating physical things, new products, ideas, development. We’re maintaining, reporting…… not making actual change.
Constantly creating, curating & connecting ideas is what you want to do, create your systems so they generate. Talking to Michael Gerber of E-Myth fame earlier this year, he says the absolute best companies are those that make their customers creators, they help them create.
His business helps you create the business you want, McDonalds helps you create your meal, Apples whole product suite is based around creating & expressing.
I triple double guarantee that anytime you start to get sick of something, it’s because you’ve stopped creating.
Kaizen, an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement.
[From Wikipedia] The cycle of kaizen activity can be defined as:
This is the standard business model.
It’s worth acknowledging that everything has a need for continuous improvement, constant maintenance, growth, nurturing.
The idea that you can set & forget doesn’t make any sense, especially in a technology driven world. Embrace it.