Directionally correct

My new power mantra

Perfectionism

Starting my professional career as a software developer I believe has been both a help and a hindrance. The help has been that it was the right time, right place for technology and my passion to collide. The hindrance was that software is about perfectionism and to rise to the top you must be perfect all the time.

You see, in software, there are a thousand ways to do something and one right way. And the problem with software is that it is a very mutable medium meaning you can do anything you can think of, whereas in the physical world there are limitations with what can be done.

In my experience - all things in life benefit from when building something:

• Occam’s Razor Principle

• First Principles Reasoning

Both of which require a lot of time and resources in comprehension and reasoning.

The point I am making is that working with software for multiple decades has made solutioning for perfection a habit.

Directionally Correct

I am now at the point where I’m trying to increase the value I offer to the world by trying to do more. Doing more means outputting more value. Outputting more means leverage.

Leverage means using other people and resources

From moving on from the software world I have started to increase the volume of reading that I do on business. A key pattern from business reading that I see is the idea of:

Directionally correct

Directionally correct isn’t perfection out of the gate, it isn’t where all things are known ahead of time. It is intuition, it is known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns and the confidence to pace forward into the fog and to maintain that velocity and direction.

An example in most businesses is where you start with an idea and in most cases the idea is wrong and doesn’t provide any value to the market place. You need time, exposure and feedback from consumers to find out what they really want. In order to get to this place in time, you need to be offering something then course adjusting along the way to adjust for feedback.

Think of it as a cruise missile - you send it on its way, then as weather, wind, visibility, threats occur, the missile course corrects with gradual small nudges in the right direction.

Leverage

The same occurs with leading a team. Being a micromanager means you are bottlenecking the throughput of a team. You need the team to be directionally correct and then nudge the team in finer and finer increments until the goal is met.

If patterns are found in downfalls, common mistakes or repeated work, they can be systemized into procedures and manuals.

I’m now utilizing directional correctness in my life with an active and deliberate decision to delegate work and scale my value through throughput.

Investing

Directionally correct applies to investing too.

Good, Better, Best

I apply a Good, Better, Best approach to most things in life. Good gets you started, you jump in missing experience and knowledge. The commitment to Good means you’ve produced something that’s good. Rather than not producing anything at all.

With time, learnings from your Good implementation can be refined leading to Better, Best.

With investing, intuition is the starting point.

Intuition typically is a feel and a lack of knowledge. With time, backfill that lack of knowledge with knowledge. Conviction will be produced. If not - dump the position and re-allocate.