Success Quote by Bill Budge

Two weeks is a deceptively small unit of time, and that’s exactly why Budge’s line lands: it’s a businessman’s pushback against the romance of the long game. The intent isn’t to deny patience or craft; it’s to force a verdict before momentum turns into superstition. In work culture, “give it time” is often less wisdom than a permission slip to avoid admitting you aimed wrong.

The subtext is about signal-to-noise. Early in a project, reality is loud: stakeholders either show up or they don’t, users lean in or bounce, technical risks reveal themselves, the team’s energy spikes or flatlines. Past that initial window, people get busy defending the investment. The sunk-cost story starts writing itself: one more sprint, one more redesign, one more meeting that will surely clarify the mission. Budge is trying to cut that off by making speed a moral choice, not just a schedule preference.

Context matters: this is a mindset born from environments where feedback is immediate and failure is expensive - startups, product teams, sales-led orgs, anyone who has watched months disappear into a “strategic initiative” that never touched a customer. The line also smuggles in a discipline: design work to be testable fast. If you can’t learn whether it works in two weeks, you’ve built a project that protects itself from the truth.

It’s not anti-ambition. It’s anti-delusion, with a stopwatch.