Sometimes the road blocks that are keeping you from where you want to go are actually the ideas you like the most. Perfection is the enemy of progress, but so is vanity. Learn to let go, says Henning, as he describes a feature he loved, but removed from his bucket list app.

My first app concept included just one screen for each goal. That screen had an area for a picture, and area for text, and a thermometer on the side, which would show your progress in achieving your goal. I envisioned the user sliding his finger on the thermometer to set the goal’s progress.

Today there is no thermometer. It was a bad idea. It took me a while to realize that, and I didn’t want to admit it at first. I just thought it would be cool, and my stubborn little brain didn’t see what a crazy idea it was.

Henning had to become comfortable “killing his darling,” a turn of phrase from William Faulkner that I first read in Lew Hunter’s screenwriting book. Faulkner and Hunter were both offering advice on writing. I think it works for many areas of your life, from product management to planning a vacation.

Ideas are nothing without execution and a misplaced idea that you love can be a major barrier to executing. Assumptions are powerful when you don’t take a moment to question them.

So, don’t kill all your favorite ideas, your darlings, but at least consider it.

If I told you there is a guy who travels the world dancing for a living, you’d call him a professional dancer. If I told you he had no formal dance training, you’d be impressed.

Matt Harding has paid his bills by dancing dorkily all over the globe. And in a great interview with the New York Times, he shares one secret to his success:

We usually only danced a short time for each clip. I knew I was only going to use four seconds, so I would just loop the move I wanted and we’d do it a few times; there wasn’t much point in beating it to death. When you’ve got a large crowd of untrained dancers, the challenge is keeping their energy up. The most fun and exuberant moments always come at the beginning, after they’ve gotten the basics of the move down, before they start looking tired, bored and cranky.

Also, I’m very lazy. If there’s a word that means the opposite of perfectionist, I’m that.

What are you spending too much time on now that would be good enough if you didn’t try so hard?

(This post written in about five minutes)

If you want to run a marathon successfully without getting injured, spend four days a week doing short runs, one day a week running long and hard, and two days a week not running at all.

Now, that seems like a pretty smart schedule to me if you want to do anything challenging and sustain it over a long period of time. A few moderate days, one hard day, and a day or two of complete rest.

— Peter Bregman, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done

Many people use “complex” as a synonym for “complicated.” In make a complex startup, Peter Ehrlich doesn’t argue to make things complicated. In fact, he says to make them simple. And complex.

An idea must be complex inside (to the founders), for otherwise it is nothing and weak. It must not be complicated inside, for then the founders do not understand their own creation, and more time must be spent.

An idea must be simply represented on the outside (to the users). In a world rich with information, understanding something complicated is a heavy investment on the part of the user. This can only rise in correspondence with the popular belief of the worthiness of your product.

An idea that is complex on the inside, but complicated on the outside is ahead of it’s time. Users need catch up, so that it becomes more simple and obvious.

Some call this simplexity, the idea that a single button can connect to a complex series of events in order to start a car, run an elevator or buzz an intercom.

Taken from the other direction, I like the idea that to be useful something has to be complex. Otherwise there’s nothing left to make simple. In startup terms, you need to solve a problem. And if your problem is too simple, then it might not really be a problem.

The Laws of Simplicity get further into this topic, especially the law of differences, which says simplicity and complexity need each other.

“Occasionally people slip out the front door and then they wander.”

That was the problem facing a senior center in Germany. Their patients, afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s, would walk away in a desperate search for a reality that only exists in their heads. The story is told in fifteen minutes on an episode of the Radio Lab podcast:

“He sat on an advisory board at the senior center. And one day he came up with this idea. It’s one of these ideas that’s so out there and yet so simple that you think it just couldn’t possibly work.”

Install a bus stop. Or, more appropriately, a fake bus stop. That’s all it took to stop the wandering patients and give the staff a chance to notice they’ve slipped away.

Do you have a recurring problem with your website, business, or personal life? Perhaps you need a fake bus stop, something that works with the other party rather than against them… and still ends up giving everyone what they want.