What are you optimising for?

Perfectionism is an example of a mistake we make in lots of different ways: unwittingly optimising for the wrong thing.

Let's take marketing yourself on social media as an example.

Striving to make everything you 'ship' (as Seth Godin calls it) the highest quality possible does seem, in some ways, to be a good thing. Optimising for quality means people should get a good impression of your work, no?

To a degree, yes.

However, compare that to if you instead optimised for resonance. How would your social media strategy differ if you tried to optimise the amount of resonance between you and your audience?

I think you'd post more often.

I think you'd be more experimental.

I think you'd be more authentic.

And, crucially, I think you'd be more effective. Your social media would do a better job of finding and attracting people who want to work with you, which is the whole point of posting your work to social media in the first place.

The intent to build quality is good, but it only becomes the optimum strategy later in the journey (generally, when your work is bringing in $300-$500K annually... ish).

A really useful question to ask yourself is: "What am I optimising for?"

If this article resonated with you, go ahead and reply to tell me how, so that I can continue to refine my work.