Gary Story
In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg ran his engineering teams under a four-word principle that became one of the most quoted and most misunderstood ideas in the history of Silicon Valley.
Move fast and break things.
The people who understood it knew it was a statement about the limits of analysis. You cannot know what works until it exists in the world. The information you need to make good decisions is only available after you have built the thing, not before. Waiting until you are certain is itself a form of failure — the most invisible kind, the kind that never shows up in the bug reports because the thing you were too careful to build never existed to break.
I think about this principle often when I am working with students on their college application essays.