Paul wrote a post linking to the “The cult of done manifesto” some days back.
I just wanted to comment a bit further on that. The manifesto lists 13 items, and in the spirit of the manifesto itself, it was done in 20 minutes because it had to be done.
Well, not all the items are that good, but there are some that resonates well with me.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Done is the engine of more.
The funny thing, if you read through the comments to the original post, is how differently people interpret it, and react to it.
You got the people embracing it, which are typically the so called “creative” people. People doing arts or working in some sort of media. I have no problems seeing why they embrace it. Then there are the cranks that think it is stupid. I typically see the engineers there. Many of them claim this is just an excuse for lazy people not to work, and they are hard at work fixing the mistakes of these laze bastards. A couple of them claim to work in the aerospace industry, thinking they make a stronger point.
First of all, I don’t know if you’ve heard the old saying; “We could use the absolute best quality, unfortunately the aerospace industry has settled with aerospace quality”. Even aerospace is limited by time, budget, ignorance and incompetence. Like any other industry.
I think the false assumption some peaple make, is that they equal “done” with “not on my desk anymore”. This is in my opinion not true. The last one is not good, while the first one is. for me, being done means I have completed a task at the required quality standard, and if I failed to reach that, to acknowledge the fact and communicate that to those affected by it. It does not mean that I pretend to have completed the task just to ship it of to be someone elses problem. That is, in my opinion, not being done.
I am an engineer who has spend several years in the semiconductor industry, making integrated circuits, and I have spend quite a few years piloting aircrafts and maintaining my own sailplane. I think the ideas presented above is universally applicable to these activities, as to photography or any other artsy stuff.