It’s entirely possible that the only thing standing between where you are now, and where you want to be can be summed up in one word: perfectionism.

You can’t publish your article yet; the title isn’t quite right.

You can’t give a talk about zero downtime deployments; you’re not even an expert on it.

You can’t release your code yet; it’s crap compared to DHH’s code!

The quest to be perfect is a quest to create nothing at all.

And here’s the thing: perfectionism isn’t. Even once you’re sure you’ve dotted all the i’s and crossed every t, you still can’t avoid the fact that some people — lots of people even — will think it’s junk. (Can you think of a single piece of software that isn’t the subject of seething rage by a vocal minority of non-doers?)

Thankfully, perfectionism doesn’t matter. Creating value is what matters.

If your screencast on refactoring ugly code saves me half a day of work, I’ll forgive the audio glitch between 5:20 and 6:14. If your article helped me figure out how to deploy my first Rails app, I don’t care that you misspelled “its” three times.

You’ve got something we want to see/know/buy/learn. I don’t want it to meet your definition of perfect; I just want it to meet my definition of done.