Why Ship Fast?

The only reason to ship fast is to increase your chance to win.

Shipping fast means failing more often, which gives you more shots at success. Ironically, the more you fail, the higher your odds of winning—it’s reversion to the mean. Scared of failure? Ship faster. Less rides on each launch.

What fast shipping does:

• Get feedback. Before you ship, feedback is everything. The only way to get it is to put your work out there.
• Iterate to quality. Fast shipping irons out bugs quickly, leading to a better product over time.
• Build momentum. Shipping fast creates a flywheel effect—success compounds, proof piles up, and you gain confidence in your ability to just do things.
• Beat the clock. Ship before you run out of money or willpower.

What Fast Feels Like

Expect outsized effort. Expect strain and discomfort. In fact, you want a cycle of strain and adaptation. Feeling good is secondary to moving fast. By definition, “fast” is beyond your comfort zone. Fun can help, but it’s not a substitute for speed.

If you’re perfectly comfortable, you’re not moving fast enough.

To ship fast, push yourself past what’s comfortable for longer than feels natural. Make it as enjoyable (or as bearable) as possible. Efficiency ranking:

• Enjoyable fast work > Unenjoyable fast work >>> Enjoyable slow activities > Unenjoyable slow activities.

You can adapt to the intensity with practice. Once you do, push harder again.

Apply this everywhere:

• Ship before you’re ready.
• Brainstorm multiple ideas in 5 minutes, even if they feel dumb.
• Start writing without knowing the end.

Your goal is to FEEL LIKE you are minimising confidence in your ability to succeed. Confidence should be in hindsight when you look back and see what you completed. In the moment, you should feel uncertain.

How to Ship Fast

• Focus. Pressure = Force / Area. Focus shrinks the area, amplifying pressure on a problem. Apply your skills to one specific target. Focus means prioritizing—don’t bounce between tasks. (See Sam Altman’s advice.)

  Focus is a force multiplier on work. Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter. Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful. - Sam Altman

• Subtract and simplify. Don’t build a sprawling product. Nail one core feature that’s better than anything out there. Aim for simple, lovable, and complete.

  Example: In an AI education tool, I built solver, learn, and practice modes. But the solver didn’t even work! I overcomplicated it by ingesting syllabi and generating content. I should’ve focused on a killer math solver—the core feature students would use most—before adding extras.

• Follow the rule of 100. Do something 100 times before worrying about quality. The first 100 attempts will suck, and that’s fine—no one cares yet.

• Simplify when overwhelmed. Overwhelm hits when your expectations outpace your skills. One sign of overwhelm is procrastination which prevents shipping. Procrastination happens when the load of doing a task is too high to start. When you feel overwhelmed, scope down and simplify your task.

• Gamify the boring stuff. The inverse of overwhelm is feeling bored of doing small but necessary tasks. This is the other cause of procrastination. If you lack motivation, create metrics you can track. Make it a game to continuously improve your score. The goal of the game should be to increase the number of iterations in a fixed time.

• Spot bottlenecks. If 20 iterations take 5 hours each, spend 2 days building a tool to cut that time 10x. But first, question if the task is even necessary (See Elon Musk’s algorithm).

• Consequences >>> Motivation. When you’ll go broke unless you ship, motivation isn’t the issue—you just do it.

• Interleave a wide variety of productive work that you enjoy. You’ll get tired, bored, unproductive if you move along one dimension for too long. Find unrelated activities that are part of shipping. Whenever you get bored or tired of doing one activity, just switch to a different one and move on a different dimension. With that said, make sure the activities are important to shipping and you’re not just running away from your problems.

Common Misconceptions

Misconception 1: Focus on perfect, not fast.

Reality: Perfect is like going to the gym to lift weights but only lifting a single heavy rep over the entire course of your workout. You need to be lifting more reps if you want to get stronger, and the only way you can crack out those reps is by focus on doing lots of reps with a level of weight that’s appropriate to your current skill level.

Misconception 2: Shipping fast means poor quality.

Reality: Fast shipping = fast feedback = faster fixes. In one month, a fast approach beats a “perfect” one hands down.

Misconception 3: Fast is doing the same thing over and over.

Reality: It’s about iterating fast, not repeating blindly.

Misconception 4: Fast skips thinking.

Reality: Fast instead means thinking through many things quickly. Fast applies to all levels - thinking, building, shipping, feedback, iterating.

Misconception 5: Fast is a switch you turn on

Reality: “Fast” isn’t a toggle you flip—it’s a muscle you build. You start at the pace your current ability allows, and your velocity ramps up as your skills improve. Thinking of speed as an on/off can be frustrating: if you’re not sprinting, you feel like you’re failing.

Instead, fast is relative. A beginner’s “fast” might be shipping a rough prototype in a week; an expert’s “fast” could be a polished feature in a day. The key is to push your limits and let adaptation do the rest.

Misconception 6: Fast is easy.

Reality: Moving fast is very hard work. To cover more ground, you have to work longer and think faster. It should feel like you’re running faster for longer. The good news is you can adapt- just look at this guy running 250km weekly.

A corollary: Prioritize high-quality rest—sleep, diet, mental breaks (exercise, meditation). Nature, cold showers, and social interaction can boost dopamine and recharge you.

Practical tips for recovery:

• End showers with 1-2 minutes of cold water.
• Get sunlight and time in nature.
• Have meaningful conversations.
• Breathe deeply, meditate.
• Exercise.
• Combine (e.g., music on nature walks).

In the spirit of shipping fast, I published this post in one sitting. Please pardon any errors.