You won’t get it right on the first shot.
Moving from an idea to something you can share with the world requires implementation.
And through implementation, you figure out what you should’ve been building.
Your sense of perfectionism doesn’t help.
It’s an illusion that keeps you from completing the full creative cycle.
At one of the companies I’m building, we went through this just a few days ago.
We worked for weeks on a version of our product, taking it from the initial idea to the first prototype.
We gave it to the first 100 people…
…and painfully saw all the things we got wrong.
But we wouldn’t know what to build if we hadn’t built a first version.
Through the act of making, we figured out what we should’ve been making.
The same is true for engineering.
When you build a complex feature, you might spend hours writing code and end up with a subpar result—overly complex, messy, not what it should be.
If you then start again from scratch, you can likely build the same feature in minutes—and do it right on the “first” shot.
By implementing and doing the work, you discover how you should’ve been building that feature.
And this principle expands across domains:
Content creation. Music. Writing. Art.
It’s the idea of iteration.
Iteration is an inevitable part of doing great work.
And the biggest mistake you can make is not making the thing to begin with.
So don’t blame yourself for getting it wrong on the first few tries.
See it for what it is: progress.
To figure out what you should’ve been making, you need to make it first.