How to Stop Overthinking: Start Small to Win Big
Everyone says startups should ‘fail fast’ so they can succeed. Here are proven strategies to actually do it.
How to Stop Overthinking: Start Small to Win Big, There’s an age-old axiom that says perfect is the enemy of good. And nowhere is that truer than in business. One of the things that we, as entrepreneurs, tend to struggle with the most is perfection. You overthink everything in an effort to create perfect processes, as well as phenomenal products and services for your customers, so you can make money and make everyone happy. It’s like you have a built-in drive for perfection.
But, many times striving for perfection gets in the way of doing good enough, which then becomes a significant barrier for making progress. That’s especially true in an age where everyone is talking about running agile development and “failing fast.” Here’s how to do it right.
Start with small experiments.
It’s about taking small, directionally correct steps toward your goal–and maybe even ultimately perfection. When you make a series of small experiments, it gives you multiple opportunities to learn, even when you fail.
Changing your mindset and using successive small experiments, and subsequent failure, is actually the most effective way to learn as you drive closer to your business goals. The truth is nobody is smart enough to predict the future and everything that can go wrong. So why constrain yourself by trying to plan for perfection?
Stop overanalyzing every move.
The enemy to failing fast is when you become highly analytical in that pursuit of perfection. That’s where you map out every step of a journey and think everything through to the nth degree before you even start, as a way to hit perfection. But the result of this approach is often long planning cycles and paralysis by analysis, so nothing happens.
