drwex | Journaling project, Day 16

If you wait until you feel 100% ready, you will be waiting the rest of your life. Realize this! Some people wait all day for 5pm, all week for Friday, all year for the holidays, all their lives for happiness. Don’t be one of them.

What’s one (true) reason you’re good enough and ready enough, right now?

Yay, finally a prompt I can get behind. "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is one of my mantras. And of course this circles back to the "satisficing" theme that's been in the last few prompts. We need to make good decisions, and recognize they won't be perfect ones.

Likewise, I remember conversation with Pygment about having children and expressing my fears of not being ready. She said, and these days I believe, that nobody is ever really ready - at least for the first kid. You just have to make the preparations you're able, take sensible risks, and obsess over your backup plans. Like, forEVER. OK, that's definitely just me.

In my business life I'm fond of saying that "shipping product is a usability feature". That is, we can keep tweaking and designing and iterating and improving all in the name of making a more usable product but at some point you have to ship the damned thing. Because if nobody uses it then it doesn't matter how "usable" you think it is. I also owe a lot to the Media Lab's "fail early, fail often" mantra.

So, one reason I'm good enough and ready enough now is because I won't get better or readier. As someone well into his middle age I'm starting to think about things like "how many years until retirement" and "how will I pay for that" and "what sort of end-of-life things do I want". I get older one day every day while the sun chars the other side of the world and while I'm not a "live like you were going to die tomorrow" person - that would make me insane - I do think it's wise to use my remaining time fully. Whether "fully" means soaking in the night air just to test how the humidity feels or completing a nagging project that's been hanging around forever is still to be determined. I'll make a plan for that. And a backup plan...