I've watched teams spend months perfecting work that never launches. Endless rounds of refinement. One more tweak. One more review. One more round of optimization. And while they're optimizing, the deadline passes, the moment fades, the opportunity closes.
Perfect is the enemy of launched.
This doesn't mean ship garbage. It means understand that done is a state, and perfect is a direction. You can move toward perfect forever. But done has a deadline. And until you reach done, perfect is just theoretical.
I've seen brilliant campaigns killed by perfection. One more research round. One more focus group. One more legal review. By the time they're ready, the cultural moment has passed. The idea was perfect. But it was perfectly late.
This is particularly true in digital. Digital culture moves fast. A good response today beats a perfect response next week. Because next week, nobody remembers what you're responding to.
Look at Oreo's "You can still dunk in the dark" tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout. Was it perfect? No. It was quick. And quick won. Because the moment demanded quick, not perfect.
The first iPhone didn't have copy-paste. It didn't have apps. It didn't have 3G. By any measure, it was imperfect. But it was done. And done was enough to change everything. Perfect would still be in development.
Perfect is often just fear wearing a disguise. Fear of judgment. Fear of failure. Fear that if we launch it, people will see it wasn't as good as we hoped.
But work is only potential until someone experiences it. And potential doesn't compound. Launched work compounds. It generates feedback, creates opportunities, opens doors. Perfect work generates meetings.
So ship it. Launch it. Let it be imperfect in public rather than perfect in private.
And momentum beats meetings. Every time.