Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Restaurant That Wouldn't Open
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Restaurant That Wouldn't Open. Here we go. A chef named Renata signed the lease on her restaurant 14 months ago. The space has been ready for over a year. The sign is up outside. The kitchen has been inspected twice. The doors have never opened because the menu is not finished. Renata has reworked her signature dish, a braised short rib over polenta, more than thirty times. Each version fixes something the last one got wrong, and each fix seems to expose a new problem she had not noticed before. She's hired and let go two sous chefs in that stretch, both frustrated by a schedule with no opening date attached to it. Last week her landlord sent a letter. If the doors are not open within 60 days, the lease is void. Cheryl Sandberg ran into this same instinct in herself, and she wrote a line about it that has outlived the wall it was originally painted on. It started as a poster at Facebook's offices. She adopted it as her own working rule and put it in her book, Lean In, where she said, Done is better than perfect. Sandberg has talked about rewriting the same email eight times before sending it. She would also hold a presentation back another day for one more pass that never actually made it stronger. What changed for her was not her standards. It was the moment she noticed the extra passes were not improving the work anymore. They were just delaying the point where someone else got to react to it. That's the exact spot Renata is stuck in. She's not a mediocre cook stalling because she's unsure of herself. She is a genuinely excellent one caught in a version of the same trap that Sandberg described. Somewhere along the way, get this right quietly turned into make sure nothing can ever be criticized, and those are not the same goal. The second one has no finish line because there's always one more adjustment left to try. Here's where people usually misread Sandberg's line. They hear, done is better than perfect, and assume it means lower the bar, rush the plate, stop caring about quality. That's not what she meant, and it is not what fixes Renata's situation either. Nobody's asking her to serve a dish. That she has not tested. The reframe is a distinction, not a shortcut. Perfect is a standard Renata is guessing at, alone, in her own kitchen, against an idea in her head that keeps shifting every time she gets close to it. Done means the dish is in front of an actual diner who will tell her something no amount of solo tasting ever could. One of those paths produces real information, the other just produces more revisions. Now it's worth naming. What an AI tool changes here and what it does not touch at all. Renata could ask an AI tool to generate 50 polished descriptions of her short rib in under a minute. That is more refined language than she would draft in a week on her own. That's a real convenience, and there is no reason to avoid it. What it cannot do is stand in her kitchen at six on a Friday. It cannot decide whether tonight's plate, imperfect in some way she can already name, goes out to table nine anyway. That decision carries real consequences, made under real pressure, and it is still entirely hers to make, tool or no tool. Here's something worth trying this week. Find the project sitting in your own drawer, the one you've been calling almost ready for longer than you would admit out loud. Instead of the version you're picturing, send out the version you actually have. Let it meet a real person before you touch it again. Then carry this forward past today. The gap between a good version and a perfect one was never going to close through more private editing. It closes through contact with something real, a customer, a reader, a team, that tells you what your own head could not. Renata opens eleven days later with five dishes instead of the twelve she had originally planned, the short rib among them, served exactly as she left it that morning. The line outside runs past the corner by the second week. Two regulars mention the short rib needs a touch more acid, and she adjusts it by Thursday. Something no amount of solo tasting ever surfaced. A year later, that dish is the reason people say they first walked in. It was never the 12-dish version she was chasing. It was the five-dish version she finally let someone taste.