Good Enough to Move On

Measure twice and cut once, the saying goes. In reality, most teams measure 183 times and never make the cut.

Instead, people ruminate in uncertainty and avoid being decisive. The team takes one more lap around the question, then another, then a third for good measure. Meanwhile the world isn’t waiting. Your competition certainly isn’t waiting. While the team is hunting for certainty, somebody else is shipping.

We often confuse perfectionism with diligence. Underneath, it’s usually just fear.

The best of the best do something else. They move things along as quickly as possible, get it mostly right, and then move it forward long before it reaches a state of perfection. They realize that speed and iteration are more important than flawlessness.

Leadership author Craig Groeschel coined a phrase that names the antidote: GETMO — Good Enough To Move On. Get the work to good enough, then actually move forward to the next step. The job is velocity, learning sprints, and rapid adjustments toward the next version of the thing.

Pieter Levels has built a career on GETMO.

The Dutch developer ships new products in weeks, sometimes days. He uses tech most modern developers would call outdated, and runs the whole operation off a single $40-a-month server. The early versions are usually ugly. He charges for them from day one and posts the revenue numbers on Twitter for everyone to see.

Out of more than forty profitable internet businesses — Nomad List, Remote OK, Interior AI among them — he generates around $200,000 a month with no employees, no investors, and profit margins above 90 percent. He’s still shipping. 

His latest “good enough” project, fly.pieter.com, launched in February 2025. Pieter asked Cursor, an AI coding tool, to “make a 3D flying game in browser with skyscrapers.” Three hours later, he had a working prototype. He had never built a game before.

He shipped it to the public anyway, set up monetization through in-game ads and paid upgrades, and posted the link on Twitter. Seventeen days in, the game was generating $87,000 a month in revenue — a million-dollar annual run rate, and the fastest growth curve of any project he’d ever launched.

Plenty of companies fall into the opposite pattern. They keep refining in private while the market moves on without them. By the time their perfect version arrives, the moment has passed.

Three habits to put GETMO into practice:

1. Get clear on the real goal. Focus on the actual outcome you need next — your first hundred customers, your tenth paid pilot, the contract that proves the idea. Build the smallest version of the work that gets you there. Everything else is a future problem.

2. Fast, bad, and wrong. Plan for the first version to be a mess. Expect the second to fix half of what the first one broke. When you accept that going in, you stop wasting energy trying to prevent mistakes that only show up in real use.

3. Stack the small wins. Velocity comes from compounding completions — one small win this week, another next week, another the week after. The big breakthrough is usually just the visible part of a long string of small ones.

Get it good enough, and then actually move forward.