Ship before you are ready

During my PhD, my advisor taught me to wait.

Make sure your experiment is perfect and completed before writing the paper. Make sure all the figures are ready and approved before you start drafting. When you finally write, you go through countless revisions. The more colleagues you ask to review your manuscript, the more feedback you receive, the more you revise.

It made sense at the time. Academic work demands rigor. Precision. The fear of being wrong in print.

But the real world moves differently.

Companies care about revenue, regulatory obligations, customer risk. Speed is an asset. There is power in moving first, even if you're not fully ready.

I think about OpenAI shipping ChatGPT when it still couldn't count the number of r's in strawberry. They shipped anyway. Even now, it still fails. And it changed everything.

I spent years being trained to wait until things were perfect. Now I'm unlearning that.