I was sitting with my friend Yaron, looking at an old photo. In the picture, there's a cafe - the place where I wrote the first version of my book.
Important place, you know?
Except 90% of that version is gone. Thrown away. Deleted. It didn't survive.
But that's part of the process, isn't it?
The 90/10 rule nobody teaches you
If you're a product manager or a developer, you probably get this instinctively. You build something, you ship it, you discover most of it doesn't work the way you imagined, and you keep the parts that do.
That's how it goes with most projects.
You work hard. You try your best. And then you discover that a huge chunk of what you built isn't actually useful.
Here's the part that trips people up: instead of feeling defeated by this, it should excite you.
Being willing to throw away 90% of your work and keep the 10% that's truly good - that's not failure. That's craftsmanship.
Why we hold on too long
The sunk cost fallacy is real, and it's everywhere.
We keep the paragraph that took us three hours to write, even though it doesn't serve the piece. We keep the feature that took a sprint to build, even though nobody uses it. We keep the process that took months to design, even though everyone works around it.
Because we invested time. Because it's "ours." Because deleting it feels like admitting we wasted that time.
But we didn't waste it. We needed to write those nine paragraphs to find the one that worked. We needed to build those features to understand what the product actually needed.
The work wasn't wasted. It was exploration.
How this applies to management
Managers face this constantly. The strategy you spent Q1 developing that isn't working. The hire you fought for who isn't fitting in. The team structure you redesigned that's creating more problems than it solved.
The best managers I know have a superpower: they can look at something they built, acknowledge it isn't working, and change course. Without ego. Without drama. Without spending another quarter "trying to make it work."
They keep the 10% that's working. They let go of the rest.
Somewhere out there, that first version of my book is probably hiding under a table in that cafe. Most of it deserves to stay there.
But the 10% that survived? That became a bestseller.