"I want to love it."
I have heard this excuse more than once from would-be entrepreneurs. I say would-be because that desire for love blocks the willingness to engage the market and take a real risk. As long as one is in a dark room, their code is a private secret known only to them and their keyboard. There is no undertaking, which is the root of the word entrepreneur.
This same block hits even in the middle of a venture. We look at how we can handle a situation better. Better is a nettlesome concept. The quest for an optimal plan can comfortably paralyze one to prevent action. I have fallen prey to this planning fallacy more than once.
As Voltaire wrote, "le meglio è l'inimico del bene." The idea that the perfect is the enemy of the good is both the hoariest advice in the book - and one that we need to keep hearing. Perfection is perhaps the domain of mathematicians and philosophers - domains with a comfortable distance from the needs of the real world.
How do we keep forgetting it? Applied math and engineering are applied. They only become what they are when they hit the real world. It is the job of engineering to get messy. It is the job of an engineer to make it work in a chaotic world.
I found that Herbert A. Simon's ideas around "satisficing" helpful in this regard. Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in economics (and never owned the Pacers) and is a giant in multiple fields, believed that economics was too idealized. Newton taught us all how ideal forms could clarify models for how the world worked. While this was a helpful beginning, ideas based on perfect conditions stopped explaining events well. Actual decision-making, he thought, was driven by getting to what is good enough given the costs of further decision-making.
For example, when getting dressed, one could figure out the optimal combination of clothes each morning based on what you have that is wearable and clean. One could imagine shirts, pants, and socks. If one has 30 shirts, 20 pairs of pants, and 25 pairs of socks, the decision matrix is 30x20x25 = 15,000 combinations to sort through. Are you putting in the hours for the tests? Or do you grab a decent shirt, good-enough pants, and whatever socks are closest at hand?
Herbert offered "satisficing" to counter the economic ideal of optimizing. We make the best decisions - discounted for time and the cost of the decision-making process itself. The friction and time functions are assumed away in ideal economics. But they explain a great deal of the variance between theory as we learn it in introductory microeconomics and the reality of the world around us.
Satisficing puts the lie to Newtonian ideas of ideal systems and gets us asking about the real-world trade-offs we need to make. Especially for the many decisions that matter less. The truth is, most decisions we make before contact with the market do not matter a great deal - except to the extent that they put us in touch with the market. The market will speak to us and tell us what is essential.
I find this idea helpful because satisficing is a worthy alternative to optimization, which doesn't justify sloppiness or laziness. Simon gives us a framework for thinking about how to make decisions in a way that permits suboptimality.
The late Steve Jobs encapsulated this idea more bluntly: "real artists ship." Anything that goes to market is necessarily imperfect. We need to get it "satisficed" and put it in the market to improve.
The hard part comes from the issues that matter to us. But it is possible. People whose reputation or careers ride on how they dress invest mental effort into the scenario I outlined above. However, they eventually leave the trailer to do their work - that is the mark of a professional. One can simultaneously care and say "good enough."
Satisficing issues that matter is a continuing challenge for us all. But shipping can become a habit to push against the demon of optimization. I write these very essays to develop a habit of consistent shipping. Projects that are not moving look more wrong and further my bias to action. I am a servant of the market.
The job is not for me to love the product. The job is for the product to help the market and be worthy of its love. That journey starts in my lab, but the vast majority of any trip is on the open road.
Satisfice pre-launch - and ship!