What is worth doing is worth doing well and poorly

Sometimes, just starting is enough.

I’ve recently started playing the PS2 version of Persona 3 and during a dialogue with the school director, I got hit with this proverb:

What is worth doing is worth doing well

The director uses this proverb to tell students to take school seriously and put real effort into their education, since it will yield results in the long run. This is good advice for people who are simply not taking things seriously when they should, like students who are forced to attend classes and do the bare minimum.

For me, though, this advice falls short.

Whenever I think about things that are worth doing in life, I end up overthinking them. Instead of motivating me, the idea of “doing it well” creates paralysis. I start planning every step, worrying about details, estimating how long everything will take, questioning how good the result needs to be, and imagining the consequences if I mess it up.

That spiral causes a lot of anxiety. My brain shuts down, and starting feels impossible. To avoid that feeling, I usually end up reading some manga or playing a game instead.

Logically, I know these worries are not a big deal. I will not be put in jail, fired, or suffer a huge financial loss if I make a mistake. Still, keeping the mindset of “doing something well from the start” creates a tremendous amount of friction for me.

The other side of the coin

Because of this, another piece of advice is often recommended online: do things poorly.

The idea is simple. If you need to do something, you do not need to care about doing it well from the start. You just need to do it. Even if what you produce is bad and needs to be redone later, at least it exists.

This approach also works well for establishing new habits. If you want to get fit, you do not need to start with two-hour gym sessions. You can just go to the gym, do three exercises, and leave. Lowering the energy required to start makes action much more likely.

There is even a productivity method built around this concept, called the “Minimum Viable Day” method, or MVD. Inspired by the idea of a Minimum Viable Product, it focuses on selecting only three essential tasks to complete in a day. Once those tasks are done, the day is already considered a success, and anything else is optional.

This mindset is great for getting started. However, it has a weakness. If applied blindly, it can lead to low-quality results, rework, or frustration when the situation actually demands care and polish.

Then what should I do?

The answer I arrived at was not choosing one side over the other, but separating them.

I still want to do things well. I just should not demand that level of quality before something even exists.

Practically nothing starts out great the first time. Writing, coding, designing, studying, or learning a new skill all require iteration. Improvement happens through repetition.

Instead of pushing a high standard onto something that has not even been created yet, I try to define two phases. First, make it exist, even if it is rough, naive, or incomplete. Then, once it is real, improve it deliberately.

This reframing reduces anxiety because it removes pressure from the starting point. The task stops being an abstract, overwhelming monster and becomes something concrete that I can respond to.

This approach works especially well in my line of digital work. Most things are cheap to redo, refine, or refactor. Mistakes are rarely catastrophic. I can improve things over time without worrying that one bad decision will cause the next apocalypse.

And you? How do you approach this tension? Do you aim to do things right the first time, or do you start messy and refine as you go?