#41 Like A Hurricane

Hello, friends.

As many of you know, I am from a small coastal town in the outer banks of North Carolina (right here). Almost every fall during my school years, school was cancelled for hurricane days. Jim Cantore almost became a regular to Carteret County when he was on the big storm beat.

Between the ages of 6 and 18, I experienced 2 missed days for snow and 8 missed days for hurricanes. During that time, only once did one actually make landfall in the 28512. Why? Because hurricanes are hard to predict.

As we go into this year's hurricane season, I think about all the effort of smart people, computing power of even smarter software and it's still tough to predict exactly where the storms will make landfall.

Now, think about all the delays, uncertainty and paralysis wrapped up in predicting how customers are going to respond to your new website or marketing campaign. We analyze, overanalyze and get trapped into thinking we can do everything right. At the end of the day, it's a best guess, just like the meteorologists pointing at the forecast cone.

Does that mean we shouldn't try? No. It means we should embrace the uncertainty and work to launch and implement our ideas so we can learn from our customer's response. Then we can improve, grow our businesses and make our customers happier. I'll remind you of this quote from Jeff Bezos:

Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

Whether you're launching a website or revealing a new creative campaign, remember going "live" is the beginning. After it's in the world, the hard (and fun) work of optimization and improvement starts.

Let's not burn mental and creative energy on being perfect, but enjoy the pursuit of progress.

Until next time.

Honestly,

- David

P.S. New here or want to revisit the archives? Check out past Notes from the Field.
P.P.S. I'm a huge fan of Dark Sky, but I'm digging this weather app. Web App or Mobile App.
P.P.P.S. Best Millennial focused ad of the year. Feast your eyes on this. #Totes #BLT