Today’s post is about speed.
Many things in life should be done slowly—to maximize each moment… Enjoying a glass of wine, creating a piece of art, making love, playing with the kids…
But if you’re trying to solve a problem today, speed is what separates the leaders from the followers. There was a cover on an issue of Strategy+Business a year or so ago depicting a frustrated looking executive wearing a t-shirt that said, “I spent $2B on R&D and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”
$1B to $2B on R&D is not impossible nor uncommon, my friends. Do the math and figure out how many people that represents.
$2B is the cost of those people moving very slowly.
- If a problem is worth solving, there are 20 people out there solving it right now. If you don’t hustle, 10 of those people are going to beat you to the punch. Been there.
- If a problem is worth solving, solve the problem before it mutates. It’s not fun spending 2 or 3 years building a huge system to spec only to find out that the problem domain changed in those 2 or 3 years. Lived it.
- If a problem is worth solving, it’s worth solving! If it’s worth solving, why wait? Are you hoping it will go away? Not going to happen!
Worse is better!
Back in the day, a guy named Richard Gabriel, then CEO of Lucid Inc., published an article called “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big” in AI Expert. The year was 1991. A very clever hacker extraordinaire named Jamie Zawinski pulled a piece out of the article, titled it “Worse is Better” and passed it around. The point (paraphrased for the purposes of this post)… C kicked Common Lisp’s ass because it was worse… but it could be implemented on new hardware fast, it could be learned fast, it was fast…
An 80% solution now is better than a 100% solution never. Hell, a 20% solution now is better than a 80% solution in two weeks. Give me the 20% solution this weekend and then get back to me in two weeks. Extra points if you ever get to the 100% solution.
Speed is how you make progress on problems today. Tara’s sign for the TransitCampBayArea says it perfectly:
This is a
solutions
playground.
if u have complaints, you need to
provide solutions…simple ones. Ones
we can execute on this weekend. If
there are bigger issues, there is
probably a better place for them than
here.
Now that’s what I’m talking about…
- Bandit
