The acceptance of imperfection is essential to working in an
operational business. In any given task there are always kluges
needed or fixes. If everything runs perfectly, it probably means that
you’re not in a growth business, and if you are, it means you’re not
pushing into “the new” quickly enough.
that’s taken me along time. Once you realize that “great products are products that ship” (Steve
Jobs?) and that in software businesses the product is never “done,”
you recognize that waiting for perfect is not an option. In fact, even
if you were to wait for perfect, it would change by the time you got
there. With that said, you need to shift your mind from “everything will be
great when things are perfect” to “by definition there is no perfect.” You can always look ahead to something: graduation, when your kids are
out of diapers, when the code base is migrated, but there is always
something next. But it should occur to you that there is only the now and the next,
you only live in the now, and there is always a next next.
