In my last article, I was talking about how things don’t have to be perfect, and trying to make things perfect actually indicates that you are not putting time into just doing things. Doing is more valuable than knowing, learning, and prepping.

Also made the connection that since childhood, we were conditioned into giving our best. That every piece of work we do is something that is going to be judged and is supposed to maximize on some scoring rubric. But in business, there is no rubric. There is only one binary outcome: “Did you make money?” In childhood, we had one linear relationship that was ever-present: the more time you spend prepping, the more marks you get. The more you learn, the more marks you get. That’s not how business works. The more you prep or try to learn, the less action you have taken and the less money you have made. The business class might portray itself as a very learned strata of the society, but that is not the key contributor. It is a class thing, a social thing, which helps them differentiate, but it is not what is contributing to their success. Jeffrey Epstein might be a really good and avid reader. That does not explain how the fuck he got all those contacts and ran that horrible ring.

First of all, you need to break the association you have of preparation and success. You are in a phase of life where preparation or learning does not equal to outcomes. Now, action equals outcomes. Shoddy, poorly planned, sloppy action gets outcomes because at the end of the day, it is action.

The closer you get to money, the more execution becomes important, and the more slop is allowed. In school, you have to be perfect. If you are in a job, you just have to get things done. You have to work enough so that you don’t get fired or your co-workers get agitated. In business, the ceiling is even lower. The big guys, the conglomerates, know the market gaps they have, they know how fragile the systems are, yet they just get it all executed and they survive in a day-to-day.

Essentially, you need the inversion in what your mindset you have right now that you inherited from school. In school, time 95% or even 99% of the time was allocated to preparation and learning, and only 1% was performance (that was the exam). But in the real world, 100% of the time can be given to performance, and those who do maximize performance time get the money. Make that inversion happen and maximize for execution. And forget any and everything you know about perfection and preparation. Just go straight in, balling.

Whenever you’re asking, “Hey, am I ready? Is this good enough?” You’re being juvenile, you’re being childish. You’re sucking on a rainbow-colored lollipop while wearing a colorful hat with a toy propeller on top. Be an adult. Go fucking do it.

School → Perfect execution required, zero slop tolerance
Job → “Good enough to not cause problems” execution
Business → “Is it enough to move the needle?” execution

Please do not overestimate how much you will need to learn or prepare, and please do not overestimate how good something needs to be to make money. Slop is okay.

from claude

Most things making money right now are slop:

Websites with broken links
Emails with typos
Products with bugs
Services that under-deliver
Pitches that ramble
Funnels that leak

And they still make money.

You can only do so much. You, on your own, cannot sustainably keep making perfect things, perfect funnels, and whatever perfect and execute it also. And execution is what makes money. So cut down on the perfection. Even if your perfection converts twice better, the sheer volume of execution that comes when you allow slop runs laps around it. Plus diminishing marginal returns, bro. The amount of effort you pour in is definitely not giving you the returns. Study and Prep 2x harder and the results might not even be 1-3% more. Better lever to pull would be volume. Improvement should be a lever to pull after volume is exhausted. You optimize what exists on scale, no points in optimizing where no scale even exists, maybe that optimization would even turn incompatible w scale if it ever comes.

The chain is:

Slop -> Volume -> Optimize -> volume

Maybe optimization wont even be needed for something you try. Invest low effort, derisk. Execute.

If it aint working as slop, it doesnt deserve to be worked on for optimization. If slop doesn’t get any traction, optimization won’t save it. Optimization wont take it from 0% to 20% conversion anyways. If your sloppy version gets 0% traction, your polished version gets… 0% traction with better fonts. Optimisation multiplies. 0*0 is 0

Wrong audience? Optimization won’t help

Wrong offer? Optimization won’t help

Wrong channel? Optimization won’t help

Wrong timing? Optimization won’t help

Since optimisation costs time, money, effort and opportunity cost, why bother doing it unless you are sure of audience, offer, channel, timing using slop?

Ship slop → Get signal (or don’t) → Kill it or scale it → Optimize only what’s scaling