Good Today Beats Perfect Tomorrow

For reasons that will become clear in a minute, I’m posting this article as a first draft, without any modification except to fix any of the typos that emanate inevitably from my clumsy fingers.

Here’s why: I’ve been working on a new podcast series about leadership with a friend of mine. We’ve recorded a few episodes; we like the content and we think others will too. After a lot of hard work, all that remained a few weeks ago was for my podcast partner to set up the account so that we could release it to the world, a task that only takes a few hours at most. A week went by, then another, and I didn’t think much of it. But after a month of radio silence I reached out to him to see what was going on.

He called to let me know he was getting cold feet. He said he’s been listening to other podcasts and they have such great production values, with perfect editing, sound quality, and appropriate music at the right times. He was concerned that ours would suffer by comparison.

So I told him about another friend of mine, who is head chef at one of the better restaurants in town. I have chef and his family over for dinner almost every Christmas for over 20 years. People ask me if I’m intimidated by hosting a chef for dinner. I tell them that it doesn’t bother me at all, for two good reasons. First, he’s the professional, not I, so why should I be worried about what he thinks of my cooking? Second, I cook a mean tenderloin on my Big Green Egg, and I know he loves it—more importantly, his family loves it too. It’s good cooking, it’s authentic, and everyone has a good time.

My point is that, if you have great ideas and solid content, people will get value from it even if it’s not perfect. (And there’s a lot of perfectly produced crap out there as well—beautiful-sounding but not worth listening to.) And if you wait—and wait, and wait—until it’s perfect, you’re depriving potential listeners of that value.

We both have the goal of saving the world from bad leadership, one episode at a time. And, given the apparent state of leadership in the world today, there’s not a moment to waste!