The Steak Press

A Perfectionists Guide To Manifesting An Idea: A Case Study

“If Something is worth doing it is worth doing badly”

- GK Chesterton

An idea that has been exciting me recently is the concept of giving yourself permission to make a bad version of something that you have an interest in creating. A lot of people out in the world including myself get stuck on what steps they need to get started with a new project, and I think this approach is the answer.

I recently heard a sort of parable (I guess you would call it) about a group of people who wanted to learn how to make clay pots. The pottery teacher split the students into two classes for the 30-day duration and gave a different set of instructions to each class. 

The first class he told to study and plan out how to make their pot so by the time the 30 days was up they could put all that learning into one beautiful pot which they would work on for the full duration of the class. 

In the second class, he was told to make a pot on the very first day and then to make another on each subsequent day until the time was up. 30 days 30 pots, they would have to learn as they went.

He then explained that at the end of the 30 days there would be a prize given to the 10 best pots as judged by him, for their quality and craftsmanship.

The 30 days passed by and the time for the judging arrived he selected the 10 best pots and asked the makers to step forward. And what do you think happened? Every single prize winner came from the second group who had made a pot each day instead of spending all the time on one “good” pot.

Now I don’t know if that is a true story but it does not really matter. The point is that progress is always a better goal than perfection. Giving ourselves a longer timeline and more opportunity to learn and study before producing a product usually does not produce the desired effect and in fact, does the opposite. Of course, there are exceptions and conditions which apply to different contexts and scenarios but for the most part, this rule is true across the board. Progressive iteration is always more effective than planned perfection. 

Perhaps you are familiar with Parkinson's Law which essentially that the time needed to complete a given task will expand to fill the time that is allotted for that task. I would go one step farther and say that their corresponding level of quality improvement over time is negligible at best and detrimental at worst. More time does equal more quality.

Does this mean I need to rush through everything I do? Does this mean I need to make poor judgment calls about my project? Or not worry about the quality control? No. It doesn't mean any of these things. You see when we shorten our timelines and act sooner we do not negate these things at all in fact is quite the opposite, we inform them with critical information about our project which allows us to do less rushing, make better judgment calls, and improve quality at a faster rate. This is all about progressive iteration. But in order to iterate you need something to iterate on. 

Ok so it’s great to talk about these ideas but what does it look like in practice? Well, I have been trying to walk the walk as well as talk the talk or in this case “write the write” so I  decided to try to put this to practice in my own life with one of the ideas that I have had for a while but done nothing about.

I will spare you the details for now but I have an idea for a kitchen appliance that I am calling the, wait for it, “The Steak Press”. I eat a lot of steaks and sometimes this is hard to do on the run, so one thing I noticed is that it took a lot of time to cut up my steak and pack it into a container for easy access on the road or at work. I was always rushing last minute to cut up a steak with a fork and knife or just awkwardly gnawing on a whole piece of steak in the case that I did not have time to cut it up or forgot to bring a fork and knife. Enter “The Steak Press,” think basically a french fry cutter but for steak, it is a cutting device which you plop your steak into and then with one swift easy motion you press down the lever and boom your steak drops onto your plate below in nice little easy to chew strips. Say goodbye to the frustrating moments of cutting or the screeching of forks and knives over a slippery dinner plate, the Steak Press is the answer.
Ok enough with the pitch hopefully you get the idea. Well, I had the idea but I was not sure how to proceed, a 3D design? 3D printing? Finding a freelancer online? Paying a company to design it? These were all options but the next step was very unclear and possibly expensive for an idea that I was not even been able to test or prove out the concept.

I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with how to proceed when I remembered a quote from Tim Ferris about how to approach finding a solution to a problem that seems overwhelming or at least very indirect. Tim suggests that you ask yourself the question, “What would this look like if it was easy?” That's all. So that’s what I did, and the answer came back that I would just make the simplest version possible with the skills that I already had. I am not good with tech or design but I am handy with woodworking, so I just figured I would make it out of wood. One trip to Home Depot and Dollarama Later and I had everything I needed to male my first prototype of the steak press.

So I built it, simply and crudely as I could in order to test out the concept. This flies in the face of my analytical and perfectionist mindset but a few hours later I could not argue with fact that this straight-shooting approach had gotten me some results, and I was ready for the big test. What happened next? Well, I documented the early testing of the steak press with a video that I will link below. But regardless of what happened the important thing was that I had got started, sure it was a pretty rough start and not what I had in mind, but that is better than a brilliant start that never really starts. We don’t know where these creative journeys will end but we can be sure of one thing, if we abandon progress for perfection then we greatly reduce the chances that they will ever even start.

So what is your idea? What do you want to make produce, perform, create, or talk about? Go make the bad version and you might be surprised what happens next. I know I was.

Check out the maiden voyage of the steak press here (The website linked in the video is not yet live)


Yours in progress,

Ben