I bought the domain for this newsletter two years ago. It has been live for one month.
That gap isn't laziness — it's caring too much. I'm a perfectionist, and for two years I kept a growing list of reasons why it wasn't ready to launch: I needed the right platform, the right publishing pipeline, the right way to make money from it, the right voice.
The spell broke when I caught myself building the machine before delivering the first thing — a post. Automation specs, a task backlog — none of that mattered without something worth sharing. So I stopped, pasted the first post into the simplest tool I had, and hit send.
What I didn't anticipate is that AI made my perfectionism worse.
Exploration used to be bound. It used to cost something — time (always), effort (usually), money (sometimes). That cost was a brake, but AI removed it. Now, you can always run one more iteration, try one more variation, synthesize one more turn. The friction that forced "okay, this is good enough" is gone — so if you don't build your own rule to stop, you won't.
Good enough is no longer a compromise. It's now a decision you have to make — and AI has made that decision harder than ever.
Here are the key takeaways for me:
The tax is invisible because it looks responsible. Every extra cycle felt like care, but "better" was the most expensive thought in my head.
AI turned exploration into an endless cycle. Even the multi-model trick can become a loop — there's always one more model to try, one more angle to stitch together.
The fix is a rule, not a feeling. "Is this done yet?" will never be yes. So decide what done means — a deadline, a result, a number of passes — and when you hit it, ship it.
Perfect is a figment of your imagination. The version in your head helps nobody. It will never be perfect, but it will never be close if the real world doesn't have the chance to tell you why. So ship when it's good enough to be useful to one person — whoever that is. For me, this newsletter is proof: it's not what I imagined two years ago, but it's better than continuing to imagine.
So go find the thing you've been polishing. Write down, in one sentence, what "done" means for it. Then hit send before you pretend you can't.
— D
Voice and direction are mine. Produced with AI.