You’re not a perfectionist. You’re afraid to ship.

I was raised to be the straight-A kid. Homework went through three drafts before the clean copy, and a typo counted as a mistake. It made me careful. It also cost me a lot of time, energy and nerves before I learned to simply get things done.

The question that finally got through to me came from a psychologist: “Why did you decide that you, of all people, have to be perfect?”

While you polish, the product doesn’t exist

No users, no feedback, no data. Just you and Figma at 2am. Every extra round of polish before release is a guess about what matters, and most of those guesses are wrong.

Real problems show up only after release, and they’re never the ones you imagined.

Set a “good enough” deadline. Then ship.

Decide in advance what “good enough” means for this release and when it goes out. Write it down. When the date comes, ship what meets the bar and put the rest on the list for the next round.

Make it normal first

There’s an exercise I still use: do it just normally first. You can push it toward perfect later, once you know which part is worth pushing.

You’re not an impostor. You’re a person who is still growing.

So, what’s been “almost done” for too long?