‘Always in beta’
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Always in beta…
Three words. That’s it.
Three words that, three years ago, helped Peter stop waking up at 3am unable to breathe.
Peter was - and still is - a high achiever in a high-pressure role. When we started working together, he was putting in 60 to 70-hour weeks and still felt like he was losing ground. The perfectionism that had driven his success had quietly turned on him. Procrastination and paralysis had moved in. He was starting to wonder whether he could even go on tour with his team - not because of the workload, but because the panic attacks were becoming a regular feature of his nights, and he didn’t want the people around him to know.
By the end of that first block of sessions together, the panic attacks had stopped.
I can’t take full credit for ‘always in beta’. It came out of a conversation between his world and mine - him talking about how software gets built (alpha version, beta version, test, iterate, refine), me talking about creative process (the sketch before the painting, the rough model before the finished thing, the prototype of a design, the first draft nobody is supposed to see). Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, the phrase emerged.
Two years later, he still uses it as a daily tool. A short grounding reminder of how to move forward.
The quote on the wall
For a chunk of my career - the years I spent teaching creativity - I had the same Picasso quote up on my studio wall.
‘Inspiration has to find you working.’
When a student was stuck - staring at a blank page, waiting for the idea to arrive before they put pen to paper - we’d come back to this. What it really means is: the idea doesn’t come first.
The doing comes first.
You give yourself permission to make something bad, and then you make something. We’d do an exercise. Draw nine boxes on a blank page. Fill each box with something. Work fast loose, messy. 10 minutes max to fill nine boxes. No time to overthink. Winning was doing it. Not the ideas or the quality of drawing. Often, somewhere in the nine rough, loose, quick sketches you gave yourself permission to get wrong, there’s one that turns out not to be wrong at all.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because it’s the same argument. The creative training I was doing with my students in a studio in the 2000s and the coaching I do now with founders are drawing on exactly the same principle. The block looks different. The solution is remarkably similar.
There is a Rick Rubin quote from his book on creativity that I really like and I think sums this up well;
‘Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results’.
The loop of inaction breaks when you decide it’s okay to begin.
Waiting for the right moment
Recently I had a session with Faris.
Faris is a founder and a CEO whose company is doing extraordinary things right now - he’s working with some of the most significant organisations in the world, and the UK government has recently come knocking. Things are, by any external measure, going well.
And yet.
He’d been noticing a pattern. Delaying certain conversations with his team. Not responding to WhatsApp messages. Putting off pieces of planning he knew needed doing. When we unpicked it together, the shape of the thought became clear: he was waiting for the right moment.
He challenged himself on it, in the session. And we sat with the question together:
…is there ever a right moment?
There’s a real cost to the waiting. Not just the things that don’t get done - but the energy spent thinking about the thing instead of doing the thing. Faris named it precisely. He’d noticed how much of his bandwidth was going into the holding pattern rather than the actual task.
The right moment has a lot in common with the perfect version. It tends not to arrive.
And while you’re waiting for it, you’re not in beta - you’re just stuck.
What this is really about
Peter’s ‘always in beta’ and Faris ‘waiting for the right moment’ look like different problems. One is about perfectionism. One is about procrastination. But underneath, they’re the same thing.
The belief that there’s a version of the thing that needs to exist before you can begin. The finished product, already finished, before you’ve started. The right conditions, already in place, before you take the step.
That belief - dressed up as high standards or good timing - is usually just fear.
‘Always in beta’ is a way of naming it and moving anyway. It’s not permission to be sloppy. It’s not an excuse to half-arse something. It’s a reminder that the current version is allowed to exist before the next version arrives. As founders we’re probably familiar with the MVP - the minimum viable product. It’s this.
The sketch gets to be a sketch. The first draft gets to be a first draft.
You get to be in progress.
If this landed for you, I’d genuinely like to know. Is there a version of the perfectionism trap or the right-moment trap that’s running in your own work right now? Drop a comment - I read them all.