10pm Tuesday night. I'd just passed my 100th hour of website editing.
Whatever dopamine wave I was riding had long since collapsed. I'd been working on the same formatting issue for nearly an hour, unable to get my "newsletter subscribe" form to be consistently responsive across multiple screen sizes. I was now making tiny adjustments to the margins with different settings.
Adjust, publish, preview on my laptop. Adjust, publish, preview on my phone. Adjust, publish, ask my partner Kyle if he could preview my website on his iPad. He looked up from the figure he had been sketching and sighed.
I had to get this right. What if someone opened my website on an iPhone 5 and the text failed to properly adjust to the 320px screen? Will they think I'm some amateur web developer who doesn't understand padding?
Narrator: "She was, in fact, an amateur web developer."
I asked Kyle if he could read through my coaching page. I waited on the opposite end of the couch, watching his eyes move like a typewriter, my thoughts arriving in equal rhythm. Did I represent myself accurately? Do I sound confident and professional? Will PhDs take me seriously or will they think I'm sort of...
"You missed a typo."
Kyle turned his iPad around. Sure enough, I had written "you" instead of "your" in one of the headings. I had stared at that word for at least 3 hours as I selected each animated icon and tweaked the padding around the grid.
The absence of that "r" crushed me.
It was close to midnight, and Kyle and I were nodding off to sleep on the couch, the glow of my website casting shadows on the coffee table.
The Paradox of Speed and Perfection
On a recent podcast, I was asked how I became comfortable with "putting myself out there". My secret, I admitted, was that I was always uncomfortable. Posting on LinkedIn, sending emails, even writing this newsletter - I carefully select each word, editing as a write. I've always been writing like this, as far back as I can remember.
I blame academia for that tendency.
Academia taught me that papers must be meticulously researched and revised before submitting. Mistakes, if I were ever so foolish as to make one, were public and permanent. I knew a paper that failed to replicate (or even worse, a paper that was retracted) could haunt me for the rest of my career.
Submitting a draft of an idea was unconscionable. "Reviewer #2" was too eager to declare how little I understood my field (even when I was a young PhD student who was just getting started). I grew to dread "peer review". It wasn't even safe in my own department. My "first drafts" were openly criticized in developmental psychology seminar, not just by professors, but by graduate students who modeled their behavior.
The result?
Over-preparing, over-researching, and over-perfecting habits that have followed me for my entire career. I'm not alone either - I see this in so many PhDs that I coach, incredibly bright people buried under a mountain of imposter syndrome.
Our struggle with perfectionism isn't actually about high standards or rigor. It's about fearing judgment from others. We fear that, if we haven't analyzed every word from every possible angle, we'll open ourselves to criticism. We've bullied each other into perfectionism, even though "perfect" is impossible.
Perfectionism comes at the cost of speed - it can take years from the conception of a research idea to its final publication. Ironically, a classic academic nightmare is getting your research "scooped". Whoever publishes first gets the intellectual credit for their "novel" idea, while every subsequent similar thought is derivative: a simple replication. I know this firsthand. My most cited paper received widespread press coverage because I wrote it quickly during the pandemic.
I know that speed is important. And yet, I still spent hours on my website margins...
"Just ship it"
Similar to academia, a major competitive advantage in industry is "time to market" (TTM) - how long it takes to get a product from idea to release. When you're first to market, you're leading the market rather than competing for its attention.
This happened with OpenAI. In 2022, they released a little generative AI chatbot called ChatGPT. Because they were first to market, they gained over 100 million users in two months. Since then, many other competitors have entered the market (e.g., Claude from Anthropic, Llama from Meta, Gemini/Bard from Google), but OpenAI still has most of the market share. OpenAI is still considered the industry leader, because they were first.
Because the market rewards speed, not perfection.
For academics used to slow, methodical thinking, this heightened pace is a challenge. You can't methodically tweak a product for years before you launch - you have to "ship it", get feedback, and iterate from there. This is the definition of "design thinking" and the core of UX Research. As Steve Jobs famously said, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." You can't predict user behavior, and neither can users (humans are notoriously terrible at affective forecasting).
Working in product development for 3 years has forced me to trade (some) of my perfectionism for speed, and I welcome that. I push myself to put my ideas out into the world long before I feel comfortable. Even when designing my website, I hesitated about whether to post my previous issues of fieldnotes - are those ideas good enough to be on my website, forever?
Maybe not, but I put them up anyway. An imperfect idea is better than no idea, and best-selling authors like Seth Godin have over 9,000 blog posts (he hasn't missed a day since 2002).
That's the nice thing about industry - no idea is final. There are always new versions and new features that come out with each release. As for me, I reworked the lessons in my After Academia Incubator program 5 times in the year after I launched. The current lessons were recorded in August 2024, and I still feel the urge to revise them with all of the knowledge and wisdom I've gained in the last six months... I won't though, because I have something else in mind.
Imperfect Actions
Over the last month, I've had meetings with over 50 PhDs about the struggles they're facing when leaving academia. I've "defined" the problem and "ideated" a solution - a workshop to help you fix your applications so you can start landing interviews, fast. This isn't an ordinary workshop - it includes personalized support and resume feedback.
Now, it's time to build the "prototype". My goal is to give the workshop to you, to "test", sometime in next month. TBD on the exact date, but getting this done ASAP is my number one priority.
I'm setting a March deadline (and announcing it publically) to combat my perfectionism. I'm accepting that this first version will be great, but it won't be perfect. That's okay. I'm tired of seeing "business bros" with half my skills build successful companies in other markets, just because they're not afraid to put their ideas out into the world.
I'll probably never feel "ready", and you may not either. We can't let fear hold us back. Apply for that job, send that connection request, publish that LinkedIn "open to work" post. If you wait for "perfect", you'll always be waiting, and someone else will walk through the door that you failed to open.
Remember: the only real failure is not trying.
