Success Quote by Trip Hawkins

Hawkins is dressing up a hard-nosed market truth as kitchen-table common sense: hesitation is a tax, and perfection is a mirage. The line is built like a friendly nudge, but it carries the worldview of a tech-era entrepreneur who knows that products are never finished, only shipped. By putting it in the form of a rhetorical question, he recruits the listener into agreeing with him; it feels like you arrived at the conclusion yourself, which is exactly the point.

The intent is practical: stop waiting, commit, decide. Yet the subtext is also a defense of the “good enough” philosophy that has powered consumer technology for decades. If buyers demand the ideal version, companies stall, innovation slows, and rivals win. Hawkins helped define an industry where timing beats polish, where the next version is always around the corner, and where consumers are trained to live with trade-offs. The quote normalizes that treadmill: you buy now because “better” is endless.

Context matters. Coming from a businessman (and one associated with the videogame industry’s boom-bust cycles), it reads as both advice and soft salesmanship. It reframes buyer’s remorse as a personal flaw (impatience in reverse) rather than a structural feature of markets designed to continually tempt you with upgrades. There’s even a quiet moral claim: purchasing becomes a kind of participation, a vote for progress.

Underneath the casual tone is a compressed argument about modern consumption: waiting can feel virtuous, but in a world optimized for iteration, it can also mean missing the moment.