It doesn't need to be perfect - Pt. 2

Perfect is the enemy of shipped

If I broke these months down into lessons, they would mostly look like repeats from previous months. I have to admit, though, that the most valuable one was a realization about myself.

I realized I am not as pragmatic as I thought: I am a perfectionist. I learned I still need to push myself to ask more questions. At first these two things seem harmless, right? Ha! Wrong. I was unaware that the combination of a perfectionist mindset and not asking the right questions was actually slowing me down a lot on my projects, both personal and professional.

Professionally speaking, I started getting the sense that I was not progressing on my goals. I got stuck on the same problem for days. Another engineer looked at my issue and pointed me in the right direction to solve it and, instead of reflecting and thinking "Oh, I should have asked from the beginning", my default was concluding that I needed to put in more effort to become an engineer like that, that I was not good enough and others were. Hopefully you can recognize the problem here. I was so blinded by this idea that I didn't notice it until recently.

On freelancing I started facing the same issues. I've been on a project for quite some time and we were waiting to have the whole set of features complete before making the official first deploy to prod. We stopped asking for payments (because the project had already been paid) and I was still waiting for the perfect app to be deployed. I pushed myself and said "let's release half of it, as it is" and even though I'm a little bit scared of the result, I'm confident that it is the right decision here. That first half is already complete and they can start using it: we were blocking half the features over a smaller set that still needs work!

On the personal projects side, I had been holding off for months if not years on building my Smart Home. I wanted to have the perfect plan and decide on the perfect gadgets and system, the perfect orchestration tools, automations, the top-of-the-line stuff. I kept telling myself "why not?". But I was, again, just blocking myself. I asked a friend a couple of questions and started everything from scratch with just a goal in my mind, adapting my next steps based on that.

Time is one of the most valuable resources out there, probably the most important in some cases. Do not waste it trying to build the best version of something.
An imperfect something is worth way more than a perfect nothing.

But, what if something goes wrong? Don't you care? Of course I care. But that is the beauty of it. None of that imperfect work is a waste: it is all learning. You now know one way that doesn't work and why (knowledge other people would need thousands of hours to earn).