What power is there in shipping?

Just do it, Nike says. They aren't wrong. There is power in decisively moving forward into action.

I've been talking with a dear friend for years about doing a podcast together. Something simple — playing video games and chatting about whatever comes up. Why did it take us so long to get our first episode up?

Overthinking got in our way. We were concerned about what to say, how to record, what to play, what our brand would be. These aren't invalid concerns, but they could have been figured out along the way. They did not need to be front loaded in our process. If our first episodes were trash, so be it — we can always toss them. We don't even have an audience, so who cares!

There is compounding power in taking the simplest action towards our goals. If we want a podcast, let's bust out our phones, open up voice memos, and record an episode while playing a game. Is it a good episode? Probably not! But the process of actually going through the creation of an episode would teach us so much — it would challenge us in how to keep conversation going; it would acquaint us with the awareness that what we're saying is recorded and will be published; it would bring challenges up to the forefront and bring our awareness to what we wanted to improve the next time.

Theoretically the quality of content could remain low. We could just keep recording with the most basic setup. But I've noticed that a desire to improve — fueled not solely by fear or people pleasing but out of a sense of fun or passion — secures future improvements to whatever is shipped. We look back and say “damn, we sound so far away from our phone mics, we can barely hear ourselves. Next time let's record on proper microphones!”. Our next episode will then have microphones — or we'll learn the next threshold of technical difficulties that prevent us from recording with mics. Either way, there's progress as long as we're committed to shipping.

The brain is such a powerful tool, but I've come to appreciate that excessive use of its executive / cognitive functions can build walls between us and what we actually want. Commitment to shipping on a regular schedule has been one of the most powerful tools I've found for staving off perfectionism that stalls progress. Yes, there is commitment to quality — but just as with a day job, you have to deliver something to your employer or you're fired.

There's no difference with our art. Ship or get fired. I'd rather ship.