Grit your teeth and ship it

Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building, you’re likely to be worse at shipping. Ira Glass has a classic quote about this. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. The only way around this is to grit your teeth and ship it. You have to force yourself to publish things you’ve made even when you think they’re crap. Programming Gifted programmers have a nearly pathological desire to build elegant, correct, neat systems. That’s what motivates them to learn the arcane details of their languages, or to spend time polishing and refactoring over and over again. But it’s also what…

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