a little housekeeping: I posted a tweet about my subscription app, Moons, and it went viral, and a lot of you said you want it. so I made a waitlist. sign up and you’ll be the first to know when it’s live.
I have a friend who is one of the best web engineers I know.
he was so good at school it was almost annoying. the kind of person who got things right the first time, who you’d ask for help and he’d fix it in the time it took you to explain the problem.
and he will not ship anything.
and I’ll be honest, I’ve been on the other side of this.
in 2023 I launched a product called the Grow your business with content pack. it had a workbook and a guidebook and was made solely from documents and notes on my computer.
when i posted about it and slapped a $15 price tag on it, it wasn’t ready. and at the time, I didn’t think it was my best work.
I put it out anyway.
it made me about $500 in the first week.
that’s not life-changing money. BUT it was real money, from something I’d half decided wasn’t good enough, and it only happened because it existed.
since then, I have never flinched (okay, maybe flinched a lot) when launching anything new.
new video, new carousel, new brand, new product. and yes, some have flopped, but I almost never regret putting something out there.
I always learn something from it, or get some small win out of it, or it takes me somewhere I didn’t expect.
I’ve watched this friend of mine for a long time and I want to be careful here as I talk about this, because he’s not lazy.
he’s not lacking ideas.
he’s not even scared in the way you’d imagine, shaking at the thought of posting something.
he just never quite gets to done. there’s always one more thing. one more way it could break, one more person who might look at it and find the flaw.
he can’t hack the part of life where you just put it out there and see what happens. the part where you only need to be bold. not talented. bold.
he has the talent. he’s had the talent since high school. that’s the problem.
the simulation
here’s what being smart does to you, and I’d bet money you do it too.
a smart person doesn’t see one way something can go wrong. they see twelve.
the typo. the person who screenshots it. the client who reads it and goes quiet. the expert in your field who will definitely notice and definitely say something. the version of you six months from now who looks back and cringes.
every single one of those is plausible, and that’s the trap. it’s not paranoia, it’s your brain doing exactly what it was trained to do, running the numbers, finding the risks. so each one feels like information.
it isn’t. it’s imagination working a little too well, at exactly the wrong moment.
less clever people ship because they don’t see the twelve. they see the one thing they made and they hit publish. honestly, lol, there’s something enviable about that.
school lied to you (kind of)
think about what made you “smart” in the first place.
somewhere early on, you got rewarded for being right. the correct answer. the clean test. the red pen that stayed in the cap.
nobody ever gave you a gold star for a rough first attempt that went out into the world and taught you something.
so you built an entire identity around not being wrong in public. and it worked, for years, in rooms where being wrong in public was the only thing that cost you.
then you step into building something real and the rules flip. you don’t find out what’s right before it ships. you find out after. the habit that made you good at school is the exact habit keeping you quiet now.
a smart person doesn’t procrastinate on the couch. a smart person procrastinates with research.
another course. another framework. a better tool, a cleaner setup, one more week of reading before you start. it photographs like diligence. nobody looks at you and thinks you’re hiding.
but it’s the drawer. it’s the same drawer. it just has a nicer label on it.
the part where it gets annoying
I’m a designer. you already know I’ve spent years looking at other people’s work.
and every so often I’d see a company rebrand and think: there’s no way this got pushed. there’s no way someone approved this. it’s bad. I don’t mean it’s not my taste, I mean it genuinely sucks.
and it’s live. it’s on the building. it’s on the packaging. somebody shipped it.
meanwhile the people who could have done it better were sitting somewhere with a folder of work that never left the folder.
I remember Michael Jackson saying something about this. the idea was that if he didn’t make the song God gave him, God would hand it to Prince. I love that because it’s funny, and because it’s true in the least comfortable way.
the idea doesn’t wait for you. it goes to whoever shows up with a finished version, even if their version is worse. a worse idea that exists will beat your better idea that doesn’t, every single time.
and that’s why the content pack matters to me. the version I wasn’t sure about paid me. a perfect one that never went out would have paid me nothing.
you’re not short on intelligence. you’re spending it at the wrong stage.
how to move the brain to after
none of this means stop thinking. it means move the thinking to where it’s actually useful.
1ship the version a less clever person would ship.
that’s the bar for version one. not your best version, the one that exists. you can be embarrassed by it later, privately, from a position of having a version one.
2write the failure list down, then answer it.
top three ways it goes wrong. then, honestly, what would happen if they did. most of them end in “a few people notice for a day.” some of them end in “nobody notices at all,” which is somehow worse, and also fine.
3borrow a deadline you can’t negotiate with.
smart people are unbelievable at renegotiating with themselves. so give the date to someone else. a person who’s waiting on it, a post you’ve told people is coming, a client with a calendar invite. a deadline you made up alone is a suggestion.
4save the analysis for the results.
the big brain is worth a lot after something is out. what landed, what didn’t, why. that’s where intelligence earns its keep. use it on what happened, not on what might.
the people winning aren’t smarter than you. a lot of them, honestly, aren’t. they’re just done thinking sooner.
my friend is going to read this, by the way. I’m not naming him but he’ll know.
and I hope it makes him a little annoyed. because annoyed is closer to done than careful ever was haha love u brooo
— mike
reply and tell me the thing you’ve been too smart to ship. I’ll tell you which of your twelve reasons is the real one.