Perfection can paralyze. Learn why releasing “good enough” work, gathering feedback, and improving over time is the key to real progress.
Hey, Friends! Did you read the first chapter of my newly released novella Windsor Greetings? You can check it out here. Or read on for lessons in creativity and innovation.
Harder Than It Seems
I received a recommendation from friend-of-the-newsletter Kevin Glowacz to check out a podcast that’s outside my normal rotation: Under the Radar. In it, Marco Arment and David Smith, two indie iOS developers, discuss the role that Artificial Intelligence will play in their field.
For context, what ChatGPT did to writing text and making pictures a year or two ago, Cursor, Copilot, and a handful of other tools are doing for software development right now.
In the episode, Arment said this about writing software:
Defining what to do is harder than it seems.
What he means by this is the hard part of writing code is not so much the semantic markup or the translation of an idea into executable code. Rather, it’s the coming up with the idea in the first place.
Listen to the original conversation at 7:50.
This conversation was reminiscent of another I wrote about previously featuring Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, on The Colin and Samir Show. Belsky discussed how AI tools will similarly lower the barrier in creative endeavors making the how less important than the what.
In a world where artificially-intelligent, agentic tools are capable of realizing your any wish, what you wish and how you share it with the world will continue to rise in importance. When anything is possible, and the world is flooded with exponentially more noise, matters of taste and opinion in search of signal will almost certainly become more valued than at any time before.
Takeaway: Before forming an opinion about AI tools, I highly recommend spending some serious time working with them to understand what they do well and where they fall short of humanity.
Simple Acts of Rebellion
struck a chord on Substack Notes last week when he posted a collection of photos featuring him reading printed copies of his favorite Substack authors while eating tacos in the park.
At the time of writing, the post has 6,234 likes, 142 comments, and 357 restacks. By any definition, that is a viral post!
Ignoring the fact that he used his phone to pose for and post these images on social media, it’s a celebration of the analog nonetheless, and boy is it ever resonating.
Being curious by the unlikely success of this post, I dug into the comments to see what I could learn. Here’s what I gathered:
Our digital lives are so pervasive that the simple act of printing a newsletter to read at your leisure feels like a radical idea.
Eating tacos in the park is like going outside and touching grass but times 1,000.
Holding a written piece in a two-column layout makes the writing feel… different, but in a good way.
It turns out, Brown had to screenshot each section of writing and paste it into a Microsoft Word document in order to format his reading selection—a clever solution, but certainly one with room for improvement.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Since it’s easier than ever to make software, and coming up with an idea for software is actually the hard part, I decided to build a small app that formats your favorite Substack posts into well-designed, print-ready documents.
It’s still pretty rough, and it doesn’t really work on mobile, but it solves the hard part of getting your Substack articles into a nice multi-column layout ready for print. Check it out here:
I’m still in search of a good name for this app. If you have a suggestion, I would love to hear it in the comments.
Takeaway: One concept in product design is to take something that people are already doing and make it better. This is my attempt at that.
Creative Juice
In Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, she espouses the Law of Attraction, which states positive or negative thoughts beget positive or negative experiences. The book also emphasizes the power of visualization.
As a trained pseudoscientist, I can confirm 100% unempirically that this works.
Jokes aside, there is something to the idea that those who changed the world first believed they could, and in that spirit, I would like to publicly plant the woo-woo seeds of my future brand deal (I’m talking to you, PepsiCo).
In collaboration with generative AI and a handful of people I follow on Substack, I’ve refined a concept for the first-ever soft drink targeted specifically toward those engaged in creative endeavors—think if Gatorade were made for Bob Ross and not football players. Here’s what it would include:
Sparkling water
Light flavoring
Mild caffeination
Adaptogens
Nootropics
It’d be a midday alternative to coffee when you’re in search of a flow state. Here are some concepts of what it might look like:
Now the day may never come that this product hits the shelves, but it was fun to imagine what that day might look like.
From an intellectual property standpoint, large language models and text-to-image generators are ethically dubious, but they’re also undeniably powerful collaborators. For me, creative work is best when it feels like play, and in this specific case, I was absolutely having a ball. I’m still in search of the exact right way to use AI in my work, but having fun with it feels directionally correct.
The only thing that could have made this better is if I were able to crack open an actual can of Creative Juice to get my creative juices flowing.
Takeaway: Daring to dream big is the first step in making big things happen.
P.S. If you’re a beverage executive reading this, my inbox is open
On Melodies
I don’t really study philosophy, so please forgive me if I’ve completely misunderstood it, but I happened upon a Friedrich Nietzsche quote that I thought was too good not to share. It goes:
The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end, it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
There’s a lot to chew on in this passage.
To me, it says that the purpose of a creative endeavor is not solely to reach its end state. You shouldn’t paint just for the sake of ending up with a painting, for example. You should do so because the act of painting itself offers meaning to you. At the same time, painting just for the sake of painting, with no end in mind, is absent of meaning and purpose. The end state isn’t so much a goal as it is a requisite condition for the act itself.
Or maybe not. The quote felt profound. Maybe it meant something different to you.
Takeaway: Set goals and find joy in reaching them.
Errors and Bugs
You might think that enterprise-grade software would be flawless, but you’d be wrong. Almost all of it is riddled with bugs.
Having used some of these tools myself, I can say with certainty that despite not being perfect, the tools do what they’re supposed to do. In other words, they’re good enough.
Good enough is a standard I’ve had to train myself to set. I’m more often tempted to make it better, whatever it is. A long time ago, though, my dad said to me, “Better is the enemy of good, and good is good enough.”
When creating something for others, it’s impossible to know exactly what they want. The best you can do is guess. So, don’t wait for perfection. Strive to solve real problems for real people, share your solution with them, listen to their feedback, and improve iteratively.
My first Substack newsletters were rough. There are a bunch of things I could change in my novella. Hell, my RSS Feed Printer app doesn’t even have a name, but if I kept all of these things to myself and only shared them when they were ready, they’d never see the light of day.
Takeaway: Don’t let better be the enemy of good.
Two More Things
Last Tuesday, I published the first chapter of my novella, Windsor Greetings. You can check it out here. I’d love if you gave it a read and then checked back on Tuesday for the next chapter in my serial novella.
Also, good things are better when shared. If you liked this, it would mean the world to me if you sent it to someone who might like it too.
I’ll see you in your inbox again next week.
Until then,
-Mike