Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business, hope you’re doing good hope life’s treating you well, I’m doing better than I deserve, honestly.

So anyways, that being said, I wanted to talk about shipping, and What shipping does not mean. I’ve said this a lot over really just over the course of my life, and really a lot over the past 10 years. But I’ve talked a lot about flying the plane, and talked a lot about shipping. And I think that flying the plane of shipping is so important, especially in business to really create momentum in forward movement. Oftentimes, we don’t have forward movements simply because we won’t ship What we have, we get stuck in trying to make it like the best thing ever. Whether it’s the product, the process, the system, the brand, the marketing, we get stuck in perfection.

And what’s happening is is oftentimes we will mask fear or doubt or self doubt, through technical work or through like trying to make everything perfect in production. And so anyways, I think shipping is a great way to get out of that because it’s like, cool, this is as good as I can make it. Let’s pull the trigger. This is it, this is all we got. And then we’ll learn we’ll grow and then we’ll change. And so I want to talk about What shipping really does not mean because it doesn’t just mean doing things willy nilly. Shipping does not mean just like, hey, I’m just going to like throw, throw whatever together, and then it’s just really horrible and a pile of crap. And then I’m going to ship that and then wonder why I’m doing badly.

Shipping actually requires thinking and planning. And shipping doesn’t mean doing things just haphazardly. Like there needs to be a purpose behind the work, you still have to have vision tied to the production. If you’re working with a team, the team still needs vision, and they still need meaningful work tied to everything that’s happening. And that is about to be shipped all that has to be tied to What you’re about to deliver. However, if you’re not going to ship and if you’re not going to do shipping, and actually push for the work, you’re never going to actually grow and improve.

A large part of this too, you can look at it is like really within the software world where they do small iterations, small changes, constant and consistent small changes, and constant consensus, small changes, to get feedback on how to better the product, to get feedback on how to actually improve in some of the things by the way, if you’re in a product based industry, like you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a minimum viable product, like there’s a certain level of quality control that you have to have before you can ship things or certain levels that you must meet and standards. Part of the problem is is those are arbitrary, like they’re personally decided to personally decided by you. They’re personally decided by other people, right? And so there’s no universal standard, they’re arbitrarily personally decided, not personally arbitrarily decided by culture and society.

But at the minimum after that is okay, how good do it doesn’t have to be from in order for me to ship and create for momentum, right? Like you think about the iterations of Apple and iPhone, and how it’s been small improvements and sometimes large over the years. And everybody makes fun of Apple, like, oh, yeah, they’ve improved this, oh, yeah, they’ve done this, they’ve done this. And it just small changes over and over and over. But that’s the shipping. And you look at how Apple’s been successful in that you look at how Microsoft has been successful the same way was shipping small iterations. If you look at how companies built, it’s actually shipping in small iterations. Okay, we’re going to start here, we’re gonna start offering this service, and then we’re going to hire somebody to help us and then we’re going to incorporate this, and then we’re going to build this and this.

And it’s one step at a time. It’s one step at a time to build, it’s one step at a time to create. And it’s really interesting, because when you are actually in this place to ship, there’s a lot of forethought in front of it. And there’s a lot of actually value tied to What you’re doing. But it also means that you know that you’re not where you need to be. And you have to have a continual growth mindset in order to ship properly. And you have to have a continual growth mindset in order for your team to ship properly. Because just because you’ve said, Hey, Here’s the green light, Here’s the button, that’s What I’m pushing does not mean that you’re actually going to be able to like stop at that moment. Right.

And so Andrew, and I’ve had this conversation a lot like how do we measure when projects are done because they go on infinitely, right? You’re building something for somebody and you’re quality obsessed? The project can go on infinitely because there’s always something that you could do better, and that you could have done better and especially when you’re learning throughout the project, right then What you did a couple of weeks ago, What happened a couple of weeks ago, might all of a sudden not be good enough anymore. According to your current standard depending on how fast you learn and grow

So anyways guys, I just want to say that shipping is not doing it has had haphazardly, there’s actually forethought in all of it. Alright, well, I’ll catch y’all later. Peace.