When do you press the Go button?

Are we ready yet?

How about now?

How about now?

That’s pretty much been the discussion over the last three weeks at Box of Crayons as we prepared for the launch of  Find Your Great Work.

And then, on Tuesday, we pressed the Go button.

Sat back for a bit…

And then spent part of the day fire-fighting, tweaking web pages, fixing links … perhaps more of than the launch day gremlins that we’d been hoping for.

So were we too early in pressing the Go button?

Well, I’m not one for regrets.  But in thinking about this today on a bike ride, I considered some alternatives…

If you’re thinking of starting something, launching something, beginning something, which alternative will you be running with?

• 1. Wait until it’s perfect

Ah, perfection.  If only such a thing were achievable.

Waiting for perfection is an outstanding way to never do anything.  Why start when you know you can but fail?

I can cross that off my list right now.

In fact, it’s powerful to say, out loud, this will be a flawed creature that makes it’s way out into the world and to make peace with that.

• 2. Do a Google

If any of you use Gmail (or as it’s called in the UK and Germany Google Mail), look up to the top left hand corner and you’ll see, in small faint print under the Gmail logo the word “beta”.

Gmail was launched “invitation only” in 2004 – and to everyone two years ago.

It has over 100 million users.

And it’s still Beta, a work in progress.

You launch something to say “this is as good as it gets for now.”

And you tweak, and share the update. And tweak again.  And again. And add things through the Labs.

Until finally (maybe) it’s good enough to put out as the Alpha version.

• 3. Never launch it

A repeat of option #1 is not really what I mean here.

I mean, launch it before it even exists and watch it be built and grow and evolve as it’s shaped by those who use it, need it, want it.

Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody is a fantastic look at how technology reinvents what community and collaboration mean, and he tells great stories about this approach.

The most famous are most likely the open source software, Linux and the online encyclopedia Wikipadia.  But it’s a lesson for anyone trying to shape community.  You can’t build it by yourself (that would be a contradiction in terms).  But you can hold and create the space for something to happen.

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking about starting, sort of starting and not starting at all.

“Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”
-A.A. Milne, British writer

“I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is, why did other people stop? ”
-William Stafford, American poet

“Begin at the beginning and and go on you come to the end; then stop.”
-Lewis Carroll, British writer