The case for finishing things badly

There is a kind of paralysis that sets in when you care too much about getting something right. You sit with a half-finished project, aware of every rough edge, and you cannot ship it because shipping it means letting those edges be real. So you wait. You tinker. You never finish.

I have been guilty of this for most of my working life. I have abandoned more things than I have shipped. The things I have shipped are almost always the ones where I gave myself permission to finish badly — to call it done before it was polished, before it was what I imagined it could become.

Finishing badly is not the same as not caring. It means you care enough to complete the loop. A bad ending is infinitely more useful than an elegant non-ending. The finished thing can be improved. The abandoned thing cannot.

The best version of a thing you never finish is worth exactly nothing. The worst version of a thing you ship is worth something. Maybe more than you think.