Underestimating the amount of time it takes to complete something is a trap that most fall for. Today I set up to updating my WordPress run site (this very one you’re reading) – a super simple task. I wanted to update some language, change around a few pictures, and ensure that it was ready to scale with the influx of content.
This seemingly menial task has now turned into a painstaking 4+ hours of work. I first ran into a bug where my customizations were somehow removing the display of all of my headers. Even worse, my blog posts were eating each other due to a weird global setting. I, luckily, pushed a XML backup right before-hand, but this still caused a ton of headache.
This WordPress underestimation is minor in the scheme of things. But what happens when entrepreneurs, politicians and corporations are always wrong on their optimistic timelines? Politics aside, Elon is famous for basically making shit up. There is no possible way that any of these timelines would work, and yet he is worshiped by people for this foresight.
This optimism happens on a much smaller scale. Budding entrepreneurs eager to build the next big thing put impossible financial growth rates into their projections. What’s worse is that I’ve seen many, super respected VC firms, promote this “optimism”. They know it’s unrealistic, but “want to make sure the entrepreneur is thinking positively” (direct quote from a partner at a top 10 firm).Here’s the issue. What happens when someone takes the time to learn about the fallacies of their operation? When they intentionally bake in WordPress failures?
They get punished for not showing optimism.