Where are your bad designs?

One of my favourite pics of 2020. The ‘no’ pile. A cartoonist for the New Yorker showed us the amount of rejections he gets for every cartoon that actually gets published.

Seth Godin says that whenever someone asks him how they can fight writer’s block he says ‘show me your bad writing’, and they don’t have any.

Often we only want good prototypes, good designs, good requirements, good software. But first you need to pay the price of iterations, draft, things you can improve on. The ‘bad’ but completely necessary work.

You can improve on something bad, you need to see it first.

An incredibly empowering piece of advice to someone tackling something ambiguos is to say “you have 100% permission to do this badly, just get something done, it doesn’t matter what, and then we’ll iterate”.

Just get started, skip the next meeting and actually get a terrible prototype done instead.