“Always in Beta.”

“Soon is not good as now.”

“Launch. Iterate. Rinse and repeat.”

You hear it everywhere. Don’t try to create anything perfect. Nothing is perfect. Just make it good enough and launch. Don’t just fail. Fail really, really, really fast.

While I believe in the spirit of these statements and don’t believe that everything we do should be perfect, we have gone too far with this meme. If it’s not good enough, don’t just launch it because you created a self-imposed deadline. This is especially true for advertising, marketing and digital products.

There’s not one person in the world that’s standing in line to see your marketing. Why are you rushing so much to satisfy a need that doesn’t exist? It applies to anything you create. What’s the rush? Why not take another week to make it better and make and a real impact?

We’re all competing for the attention of people: Millions of other things they could be doing  instead of engaging with your idea. More importantly, every time you release an idea into the world, people will make a decision if they pay attention to you next time. All of us have diminishing free time and once they consider you not worthy, it will be impossible to get them back.

You want people to spend time with your idea and, hopefully, spread them for you, you have to stop rushing. Instead, take your time, create things people want to spend time with, and make them so good they want to tell their friends.