Never Wait For the Right Moments to X10 Anything, Get Started.

An analysis of patience, perfectionism, starting & Google’s way of thinking I learned from teammates, alumni, and articles

The Paralysis Behind Patience & Perfectionism

I was someone who always struggled with starting projects. This was because I am a very perfectionist-minded person. I want to get things right and done well the first time around.

Unfortunately, life can be very messy. There is a lot of noise. There is a lot of chaos. There is a lot of randomness. We cannot always predict things and we cannot always go around and people-please in every situation. This kind of waiting around and thinking as a mindset often stifled my progress or courage to start on things. Despite many great ideas or thoughts, I would never really want to act on anything or build any kind of project from zero to success at some point in my life. That rapidly changed because I learned about the psychology concepts of learned helplessness and thought- well I don’t want to be that guy.

Learned helplessness is a concept in psychology that if someone fails at something long enough, they will believe that there is no other way to succeed or no other way to get out of a situation. People learn to be helpless. People learn to be unmotivated or discouraged. The opposite of that would be learning the habits to get things done, finding the courage to brave new projects, and the will and audacity to keep continuing.

Google, Agile Development, and Minimum Viability

When I worked on technical engineering projects at Google, we always had this mindset of doing things in agile. We could build parts of a project quickly even though we had an ultimately final version of what a perfect product would look like.

The idea of doing something up until its minimum viability point for presentation is very common in software engineering. I think engineers and builders understand that some tasks and projects are going to be ongoing and can always be improved in the future. However, in the meantime, it is relevant and important that something be done enough to a point where users can get onto it and people can start using the tools or software immediately.

That’s the power of the demo and development build processes behind a lot of ideas in the software world.

Engineering A Life Outside of Google

I wondered about what the skills I learned at Google could do for me in life. It’s a very precious thing. What do the people who are working and contributing to a trillion-dollar company know that I was missing out on all those years?

People were insanely smart. Others were good at showing that they might be insanely smart. I knew for sure though that everyone was at a stage where they were capable of doing things on their own. Everyone was at a stage where they were agile and quick learners with anything that might come their way.

These life lessons and thoughts I had at Google were super pivotal in my mindset at approaching things later on in life. Just like in agile development, life kind of unravels slowly over the years and I could not always predict, expect, or wait for some kind of perfectionist thing to appear before working toward what I wanted.

I was even afraid of starting to write online. I was pressured into it because of the economic times and the availability of remote-option workings from the technology sector. I found Meidum had a great business model that was all remote-first as many writing online publications are now in modern times away from office spaces. Thinking of things in the agile development manner- I received some courage to just start and let it play out.

Never Waiting for The Right Moment

There are a lot of parts of life where waiting can be a bad idea. Unless the project is like launching satellites into low earth orbit with a lot of risk, I believe now that there is a lot of waiting for the right moments in life that can sometimes never come. That waiting stalls a lot of precious progress in anything that people want to achieve or do.

I believe now that there are enough things in life that cannot be waited on. Some things are once in a lifetime and waiting for the right moments takes away from those magical moments.

I found a community of designers in Silicon Valley that was working off the mindset that it is better to not wait for life to provide some kind of sign or permission to get started on things and projects. I think that kind of mindset accelerated the growth of their community and now business because they were willing to try and let things rapidly grow.