I've been thinking about the importance of incomplete ideas. in my work designing and building products, it's important to build things and ship them half-done. the ideas behind why we do that are two: 1) the only thing that matters is speed, and 2) it's a safety net against spending a long time on something nobody wants.
the one that matters most to me is the second: shipping a first version and building on top of feedback is better than shipping a finished product.
let's think about the upsides of half-built products to understand why:
1) incomplete products make people want to complain. anyone (from my mom to someone in our ICP) will have opinions about how to make something better when they see an ugly, unfinished product. they'll tell you, and they'll tell you with feeling. ugly things make us uncomfortable. we want to fix ugly. (in a world where honest feedback is hard to come by, that feels invaluable.)
2) incomplete products are an ego check. think about how a product gets built end to end. take Humane. their foundational story: lots of capital and 2-3 years of work behind closed doors. the problem with working behind closed doors is that there are no feedback loops. if the people building it lack self-criticism, they can put a product on the market that's useless to everyone, because none of the internal feedback loops ever told them "this product is awful and can't even do basic things." if Humane's strategy had been more like Rabbit's (same product but a hacker mindset: "we know this is rough, it's a beta, it's broken"), they'd have benefited from that feedback loop. I think the worst enemy of a good product is its founders' opinions.
incompleteness is uncomfortable. that discomfort comes from a few places. one is ego (what will people say about this being the product I made?). that discomfort is what makes us want to create. there's something instinctive that happens to a certain kind of person when they see something ugly: they want to fix it. fixing turns into creating, and creating turns into motion.
I sometimes hear people in the startup world frustrated with incompleteness. I don't get it, because I think a startup is an incomplete idea. the ideal person for a startup is someone who enjoys the discomfort of incompleteness.
with the same frame, I can think about other things: how a big corporation can feel static because there's no room for creation, and there's no room for creation because there's an illusion of completeness, of something already solved.
how being incomplete people is what keeps us in motion. we do and we create because of that. I know Lacan talks about this. I wish I could go deeper but I don't know the idea well. what I think he says is that desire lives in what we lack. that is: we desire (we act), we move, we aim toward, only because of what we don't have, not because of what we do. what guides desire isn't what we've done, it's what we haven't yet.
intuitively it makes sense: obviously I desire what I don't have. it's the core behavior of capitalism. I want what I don't have. because I don't have, I desire. and at the same time, how powerful is the idea that we live alongside lack. that the root of our doing isn't what we've done so far. it isn't the person we've become. it's the part with no answer. the harder part to point at. and obviously that desire doesn't always show up clearly (does it ever?). we end up understanding what we want by doing, and that doing makes us who we are. only there do we uncover something of ourselves, searching in what we lack for another piece of who we are.