If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.
Interpretation
It's important to take action and not delay due to fear of imperfection.
This quote by Matt Mullenweg emphasizes the importance of taking initiative and launching projects without overthinking or striving for perfection. If you are overly concerned about how your initial effort will be received, it likely means you have hesitated too long, and true learning and improvement come from putting your ideas into action and refining them over time.
In practice
In a startup meeting to motivate the team to launch their MVP.
One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.
We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.
It doesn't matter how far you might rise. At some point you are bound to stumble because if youβre constantly doing what we do, raising the bar. If you're constantly pushing yourself higher, higher the law of averages not to mention the Myth of Icarus predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do I want you to know this, remember this: there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.
Know that nothing can hinder you but yourself. If you believe you can, you can.
There is no way around the hard work. Embrace it.
Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.
We got anxious at the end of the weekend in our urgency to try to score the winning goal. Ended up playing far too many long balls forward. That style of play doesn't suit Manchester United. We must continue to play football and enjoy the game. If we do that, eventually things will come right for us.
The only thing we can control is what we do in the present. The more we replay yesterday, the further we get from today's opportunities. And the further away we move from opportunities, the tougher the road is to get back. Opportunities never look as good coming as they do going, and they wait for no one. We need to be highly attentive to spot them. And we must be focused on our present capabilities, not past regrets.
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