Should creators keep polishing their work toward perfection, or release it once it is good enough?
Hank favours finishing over polishing: in 2017 he described taking creative work about 80% of the way and stopping, and in 2022 and 2025 urged doing a bad job more often and getting ideas out of your head.
Axis: keep polishing toward perfection ... release once good enough
Positions by date: 8 records in 7 videos. The position was refined (2018), never reversed, in these records.
Hank
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-09-14 (said on 2011-09-15, implied) | first on record | Hank says that settling on an imperfect domain name was still a decision, and an imperfect decision is far better than not deciding, the worst possible decision. | How to Make Ideas Real: Readit1st.com 00:01:27 |
| 2017-10-27 | restate | Hank's secret to productivity: he gets everything creative he does about 80% of the way to as good as he can make it and goes no further, never trying for 100%. | The Secret to my Productivity 00:00:31 |
| 2018-09-21 | restate | Hank says however good you are, your first pot will suck, and however much you suck, your thousandth pot will be pretty good. | The Parable of the Perfect Pot 00:00:58 |
| 2018-09-21 | refine | Hank calls himself a brute force creator, the only way he knows, but says a book can't be made that way: you can't write a hundred books and discard 99. | The Parable of the Perfect Pot 00:01:40 |
| 2020-01-10 | restate | After months of changing the book every day, you are told to change nothing more and must decide that every word belongs, though your mind is built to keep changing it. | The Thing I would Like to End 00:02:36 |
| 2021-02-26 | restate | Hank says sometimes you can get halfway through something, decide it is good enough and not wrap it up in a pretty bow. | Arbitrary but Useful 00:03:20 |
| 2022-10-14 | restate | On his favourite prompt, draw a crab badly, Hank says we should require ourselves to do a bad job more often, or the pressure stops us doing things we can only improve at by doing. | The Surprise Revelation of NerdfArters 00:01:44 |
| 2025-06-06 | restate | Hank advises that ideas cannot help anyone in your head: stop waiting and get them out, and even in failing you will build new tools. | The Secret Inside my MIT Commencement Speech 00:17:27 |
Dates are upload dates, which set the order. Where the speaker gives a different recording date in the video, it is added as "said on YYYY-MM-DD, implied" (derived from the date said in the video).