The 80% Solution

I write a financial newsletter, as you may have heard, and I publish it every day. If I wanted to, I could make it perfect—I could wordsmith the shit out of it, I could make it literary as hell, and I could spend 3 hours copy editing it, or paying someone to do the same. I could send out the perfect newsletter every day. And you know what? I would probably not make any more money off of it.

What I send out is an 80% solution. It typically takes me two hours to write the thing, but if I wanted to be a perfectionist about it, it would take six hours, and it would only be incrementally better. This is called the 80% solution—D for done, and move onto the next thing. If I spent six hours writing each issue of The Daily Dirtnap, I wouldn’t have time for other things, like this essay, or perhaps another book. There is the occasional typo in the newsletter, and sometimes, someone will give me shit about it, but that is a small price to pay for all the time the 80% solution frees up.

I have worked with some perfectionists, and I can tell you that perfectionism is a disease. I used to be a perfectionist, myself. The military mints perfectionists. The rack has to be perfectly made. The shirt has to be perfectly ironed. The shoes have to be perfectly shined. I used to shine my shoes so much that I could read my nametag in them. And you know what it got me? A bunch of Bs in college. I was focused on little shit that didn’t matter, instead of the big shit that did matter. That cost me later in life. Let me say that again—perfectionism cost me dearly.

I started to become an 80% solution guy on Wall Street. By necessity. Let’s say a customer wanted to sell 676,204 shares of SPY. Now, I could calculate the correct hedge in S&P futures to the contract, which would take me a minute, but I have to hedge this in a matter of seconds. So I hedge with 1300 S&P e-mini futures, which is off by a little bit, but I will clean it up later. I might lose a couple thousand bucks on my hedge being off, or a might make a couple of thousand bucks on my hedge being off, but the important thing is that I am mostly hedged. 80% solution. If I sat there with an HP-12C trying to figure out the correct hedge to the contract, I could lose $50,000 or more, as the market moves while I am tapping away on the fucking calculator. So in trading, you quickly become an 80% solution guy.

The hilarious thing is that they teach you the exact opposite in school. In a finance class, you will get a question on the test about hedging with S&P futures, and if you don’t get it right to within ten degrees of precision, you get the answer wrong. I teach finance, and I try to keep this in mind when I grade exams. If someone gets the concept right, but flubs the math a little bit, I usually give most of the credit. Now, if you’re supposed to sell and you buy, or vice versa, then you get no credit. I want my students to be 80% solution people, too.

Writing is an area where perfectionism runs rampant. I mean, if you’re going to publish a book, it has to be a perfect book, right? Well, there are typos in all of my books (except All the Evil of This World). There are typos in every book. Our friend Nassim used to go thermonuclear on editors for messing with his work. He once said there are 200 typos in Fooled By Randomness. Anyway, the typos are not really my job. I’m the 80% solution guy, I write a book which is mostly perfect, and then I give it to a copy editor, who is a perfectionist, who cleans it up. The right people are in the right jobs. The 80% solution guy makes all the money, and the copy editor makes God knows what, maybe $500 for editing a manuscript. Perfectionists always, always make less money.

Now, there are some fields where you must be a perfectionist, like when you are working at NASA. You remember about 10 years ago when they crash-landed a spacecraft into Mars because they mixed up the English/metric system? Oops. One line of code can ruin your whole day. I wouldn’t be able to function in a job like that—I really couldn’t. I think big, in terms of concepts and values and ideas, and someone else’s job is to think small. You can probably tell that I don’t have a great deal of respect for people who think small. They do have a role in society, but they’re not going to be the CEO. There is probably something about personality typology in here, too, but I don’t know what I am talking about.

I keep going over this. You have a project, like a writing project. You can have an 80% (or even a 98%) solution in two months, or a 100% solution in a year. Time is life. Get it fucking done and move onto the next project, because every day you’re working on the original project, is one day closer to death. You are dying while you work. You die a little bit each day. People ask me all the time: how do you get so much shit done? Books, conferences, newsletters, music, travel, etc. It’s because I’m an 80% solution guy. Get it done, shit it out there, onto the next thing. I get so much done because I’m dying, and I’m the only one that seems to realize it. This is another way of saying that I am impatient. I am the most impatient person in the world, and I haven’t gotten any better. But I think all successful people are impatient. Elon Musk is impatient. Jeff Bezos was impatient. Don’t dick around—life is passing you by.

That doesn’t mean you put out crap. And my 80% solution is really a 98% solution. This essay, for example. I will give it one pass for editing and typos and then I hit send. I spend no more than 15 minutes editing these things. So my first pass is usually very high quality, which isn’t true for everyone. When I went to AWP in Kansas City and I was talking with indie publishers, and I realized I was looking at two-plus year publication lead times, I was like, fuck you, I will do it myself. I can do quality control and put out an even better product in less time. And it’s not like you, the publisher, is going to help with marketing or distribution, outside of maybe getting one or two reviews. The publishing world is full of perfectionists—there are people who will literally agonize over a semicolon. Blow me. That is the semicolon of death. I mean, the publishing industry does serve an important function as a gatekeeper—a book that is traditionally published is usually good, as in, free of errors and published well, as opposed to the janky self-published POS that your neighbor just put on Amazon that 20 people will buy to be nice and no one will read. It is true that most self-published books are crap. It is true that most traditionally published books are good, as in, professionally done. You don’t see self-published books in the chain bookstores. But occasionally there is one that breaks through. Were you aware that The Martian, by Andy Weir, was a self-published book? He had it up for 99 cents on Amazon. It was in no stores, got no reviews, and no media coverage. It was a good book, and people find good books.

I am not a perfectionist about anything, not even cleaning the litter box. I’ll get most of the pee and poo, but I’m not going to spend an extra 60 seconds chasing around the one tiny turd left over. It can sit there another day. I am not a perfectionist about washing my car, even the Corvette. I could be out there all day with a toothbrush making it perfect. Nope, I’ll hire another perfectionist to do that. Strangely, the one thing I am a perfectionist about is music. If I make one small beatmatching error while I am playing out at a party, it burns me. It will ruin my whole night. I will spend hours recording a mix to make it amazing. Everything else in my life—“fuck it.”

Procrastination will destroy your dreams one day at a time. You know what else will? Perfectionism. My two favorite words in the English language are good enough. Think big. Move fast. Create. Don’t dick the dog.