"Great" is the enemy of "Go".

In his 2001 business classic, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, author Jim Collins wrote,

“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don't have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”


This makes a lot of sense. When creators, developers, and doers start to think, "this is good enough", they stop working to make it better. That's a bad thing, right?

If Good is the enemy of Great, is Great the enemy of "Go"?

In his first letter to shareholders in early 2012, Mark Zuckerberg told us, "Done is better than Perfect." He took a photograph of his desk at Facebook headquarters shortly before his IPO and shared it on his timeline: a large sign is visible that reads, "Stay Focused and Keep Shipping."

What Zuckerberg understands, of course, is that if you wait until something you create is perfect before you release it, you may never release anything at all. (Why do we wait to 'ship'? Marketing guru Seth Godin has a fantastic answer.)

I set out to create a great blog. I really did. I spent a lot of time agonizing over a witty title, dreaming about the perfect layout and visuals to use, thinking about the type of posts I would write, and regularly reading bloggers I greatly admire (like Seth Godin and Mitch Joel) to see what I could learn from their popular blog sites. I spent two years doing that. And in that time, I created nothing.

This blog is not Great.

Last week I decided I wasn't going to have a witty title, and that my name would suffice. (Hey, it works for Seth.) I realized I'm not a programmer or a designer, and decided not to worry so much about my layout; I would use a standard Blogger template and make a few minor tweaks. I realized I wasn't ever going to find the perfect visual for my blog, so I decided to muster up what little artistic talent I had and sketch a few images that represented some of my thoughts. The resulting whiteboard-drawing visual at the top of my page? It's terrible, I know. But it's mine. And it's done.

Is this blog perfect? Not even close, and it won't ever be. Is it "great"? Absolutely not, although this is something I will work to achieve with each post I write. 

But I decided what I needed was not "Great", but "GO"... and so I went, and with this first post, I officially launch my new blog. I hope you find it good enough, for now.


UPDATE:
After a few weeks, I decided to remove the visual. I thought it was a fun drawing, but it took up a lot of room and I ultimatly felt it would be better to dedicate more space for the content. Below is the image, if you're interested in seeing my work of art. (And I'm using the term "art" very loosely...)