Ship at 70 Percent
The Promise
The last 30% of information is the most expensive and the least available. Decide and ship when you have most of what you need, then let course-correction finish the job.
How It Works
- Ask which door this is. Reversible (two-way door) decisions get made fast and low, by whoever is closest. Irreversible (one-way door) decisions earn the slow, careful process. Don't run reversible calls through irreversible rigor.
- Set the bar at 70% and move. Once you have most of the information (or the draft carries the core value), decide or ship. The missing 30% resolves faster by acting than by waiting.
- Invest in correction. Because you moved early, keep a tight feedback loop to catch what you got wrong. The skill that makes 70% safe is fixing mistakes fast.
In Practice
Waiting for 90% feels responsible, but it makes you slow, and speed is itself a form of quality. Being wrong at 70% and fixing it fast beats being right at 90% and arriving late. The same logic holds for the work itself: ship at 70% and improve in the open, instead of polishing toward a perfection that never ships. Reserve the polish for the vital few things that move the outcome. Perfect those, ship the rest at 70%.
Primary source: Jeff Bezos, Amazon shareholder letters (2015, 2016).
Reading is the easy part
Install it, don’t just read it.
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Keep going
The Identity Install
Inversion
Ask how to fail first. Then refuse to do those things.
Primary source: Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack.
Ch 9 · The Momentum Playbook
Map Is Not the Territory
Your plan is a drawing of the terrain. Re-draw it when the terrain changes.
Primary source: Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity.