Ambition vs. Consistency: Why Done is Better Than Perfect
Welcome back to The Muse Letter, a weekly note for ambitious people rebuilding momentum after burnout. Each week, I break down one pattern that keeps ambitious people stuck and how to move forward without burning out again.
This is where we talk about work, ambition, and growth without glorifying exhaustion or treating hustle as an identity.
Here's why done will get you further than perfect.
Most unfinished goals don't fail because of laziness. They stall because they're endlessly renamed, restructured, and refined, or even never released into the world. Let's treat that business idea that you had, or the meal plan you were going to follow, as an example.
Incomplete plans like these don't mean you have a motivation problem. It's an ambition problem. You have enough ambition to go around. The problem is follow-through. I've learned this myself.
I think of these patterns as 'enemies of progress'. The most dangerous one is perfection.
In the last newsletter, we talked about What Ambitious, Burnt-Out People Need to Let Go of in 2026. One of which was obsessive planning, tying into that would be perfectionism. Endless perfectionism doesn't raise the quality of your work, but rather lowers the likelihood that your work ever sees daylight (or even sees it too late).
Perfection kills timing, and timing is often the difference between progress and stagnation.
Whether you find yourself questioning and tweaking something 1000 times before you post it, or end up not doing things at all because you're not happy with the outcome. Perfection not only gets in the way of completion, but of progress as well.
That’s why this year we’re choosing completion. The new mantra is, “Done is better than perfect.”
Choosing completion isn't lowering your standards, but instead refusing to let unrealistic standards dictate your pace. This year, we're going to release outputs into the universe even when they're not perfect because each release is equal to a step towards achieving our end goal.
In a world optimized for speed and artificial polish, imperfection is becoming a signal of credibility, especially in creative and personal work. We've seen it first hand, in recent years, brands have ditched perfectly curated feeds and opted for real-time shares of imperfect content to show more of a relatable persona to users. Progress is more compelling than polish because it represents possibility and momentum for the viewer, too.
This is only one example of how practicing intentional momentum can pay off. Consistency compounds faster than confidence. You don't need to trust the process, but you definitely need to stay in it long enough for the results to show up.
Perfection doesn't protect your work. It delays the only thing that makes it better, which is feedback.
Here's what done taught me in practice.
When I transitioned from working in K-pop to working in tech, I was in charge of creating content for my company. The company’s average age was on the higher end of the millennial scale at the time, but I had a very Gen Z (I’m a Zillennial for context) approach to the content. Whilst we had some viral wins by releasing a ton of imperfect content, in the end, my content was decided as not being a fit for the brand.
This was a tough pill to swallow because I had seen it work for so many brands. But I learned a lot in the process: that certain kinds of viral content CAN convert and bring in new users, but also that all approaches might not be aligned to a specific brand image.
If I had never tried, we wouldn’t have had a viral moment, gained user momentum, and gotten more knowledge on winning messaging, regardless.
Done can act as a draft that teaches you something. So don’t shy away from those lessons.
What would happen if you released something imperfect this week and treated the response as data, not judgment?
