You're staring at a blank screen. Or maybe a half-finished spreadsheet. Or a piece of code that currently does absolutely nothing. We’ve all been there, paralyzed by the creeping fear that what we’re creating isn't "industry-standard" yet. But honestly? Perfectionism is just a fancy word for procrastination. If you want to actually ship something in this lifetime, you need to adopt the mantra: make it exist then make it good.
It sounds sloppy. It feels wrong to the high-achievers among us. But if you look at the history of the most successful products, companies, and creative works, they didn't start as polished gems. They started as messy, embarrassing "Version 0" attempts that barely functioned.
The Psychology of the Shitty First Draft
Anne Lamott famously talked about the "shitty first draft" in her book Bird by Bird. She wasn't just giving writing advice; she was providing a blueprint for existence. When you try to make something "good" before it even "is," you’re fighting two battles at once. You're trying to create, and you're trying to edit. Your brain literally cannot do both effectively at the same time.
Creating is a generative act. It’s expansive. Editing is a reductive act. It’s critical.
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When you focus on the philosophy of make it exist then make it good, you give yourself permission to be terrible. This lowers the cortisol levels associated with performance anxiety. Once the thing exists—once there is a physical prototype or a rough draft on the page—the "scary" part is over. Now, you’re just fixing things. Humans are much better at fixing things than they are at conjuring them out of thin air.
Reid Hoffman’s Embarrassment Test
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is often quoted as saying, "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."
He’s right.
Look at the original LinkedIn. It was hideous. It had barely any features. But it existed. Because it existed, Hoffman and his team could see how real people actually used it. They didn't have to guess. They had data. If they had waited until it was "good" by 2026 standards, they would have missed the social networking window entirely.
Why "Good" is a Moving Target
The problem with trying to make it good first is that "good" is subjective and changes based on market feedback.
- You think people want a specific feature.
- The market actually wants something else.
- The tech changes while you're still in development.
By the time you finish your "perfect" version, the world has moved on. You’ve spent twelve months building a cathedral when the people just wanted a sturdy tent. Making it exist allows you to put that tent up, see where the leaks are, and then build the cathedral around the people already standing inside.
The Engineering Reality: Technical Debt vs. Non-Existent Products
In the world of software development, we talk a lot about technical debt. This is the "messy" code you write just to get a feature working, knowing you'll have to refactor it later. Pundits often warn against it. But you know what’s worse than technical debt?
A product that doesn't exist.
I've seen startups burn through millions of dollars trying to build a perfect, scalable architecture for a user base they didn't have yet. They wanted to make it good. They failed to make it exist. When the money ran out, they had a beautiful, empty engine.
Contrast this with the story of Twitter (now X). In its early days, it was notoriously unstable. The "Fail Whale" became a cultural icon because the site crashed so often. It wasn't "good" by any technical reliability metric. But it existed, and the core value—real-time microblogging—was so strong that users stayed while the engineers frantically fixed the pipes behind the scenes.
Real-World Examples of Making It Exist
It isn't just about tech. This applies to everything.
James Cameron and Avatar
People forget that James Cameron wrote the treatment for Avatar in the 90s. The technology to make it "good" didn't exist yet. But he made the script exist. He made the concept exist. He waited for the tech to catch up, but the foundational "existence" of the story was what allowed him to eventually execute it at a high level.
The Lean Startup Methodology
Eric Ries basically codified make it exist then make it good into the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP isn't a "bad" product; it's a "focused" one. It exists to test a hypothesis.
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The Writing Process
Ask any professional journalist. They don't write beautiful sentences first. They do a "braindump." They get the facts down. They create a "vomit draft." Only then do they go back and find the narrative arc.
The Danger of the "Polishing" Trap
We often use "making it good" as a shield. If we’re still polishing, we don't have to face the judgment of the world. We don't have to face the possibility that our idea might actually be bad.
This is a trap.
The longer you spend in the "making it good" phase without releasing it, the more emotionally invested you become. This leads to the "Sunk Cost Fallacy." You’ve spent so much time on it that you can't bear to change it, even when feedback suggests you should. If you make it exist quickly, you aren't married to the flaws. You can pivot. You can scrap parts of it without feeling like you're losing a limb.
How to Apply This Tomorrow
So, how do you actually do this? It’s not about being lazy. It’s about being strategic with your energy.
- Define the "Existence Threshold." What is the absolute bare minimum required for this thing to be "real"? If it's a book, it's a finished table of contents and a rough first chapter. If it's a business, it's a landing page that collects emails.
- Set a "Done" Date, Not a "Good" Date. Give yourself a hard deadline to make it exist. No extensions.
- Embrace the Cringe. When you look at your first draft or prototype, you should feel a little bit of internal pain. That pain is a sign that you're working fast enough.
- The 80/20 Rule of Revision. 80% of the value comes from the first 20% of the effort (making it exist). The remaining 20% of value comes from 80% of the effort (making it good). Don't flip those numbers.
Nuance: When This Strategy Fails
I'd be lying if I said this applies everywhere. You don't want a surgeon to "make it exist then make it good" on your heart bypass. You don't want an aerospace engineer to take this approach with a passenger jet's landing gear.
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High-stakes, high-risk environments require a "get it right the first time" mentality. But for 99% of us—marketers, writers, entrepreneurs, artists—the risk is not "failure through imperfection." The risk is "failure through invisibility."
Actionable Steps to Ship
Stop talking about it. Seriously. The more you talk about an idea, the more your brain tricks itself into thinking you've already done the work. You get the dopamine hit without the actual output.
- For Creators: Write the worst 500 words of your life tonight. Just get them down.
- For Founders: Build a "smoke test" landing page using a basic tool like Carrd or Framer. Spend $50 on ads. See if anyone even clicks.
- For Employees: Send the "ugly" version of the deck to your colleague for a vibe check before you spend 10 hours on the fonts.
The world is full of "good" ideas that never existed. It is better to have a mediocre thing that people can actually use, see, or read than a perfect masterpiece that only exists in your head.
Build the skeleton. Then worry about the skin.