What Would You Pay For Greenland?
And why momentum is better than perfection.
What is it worth?
Donald Trump started negotiations with Denmark in 2019 in order to buy Greenland. Imagine wanting to buy something, but you don’t actually know the price. Sounds annoying, right? But how do you price the world’s largest island? Through estimation, of course.
In August 2019, the Washington Post estimated the purchase price of Greenland would fall between $200 million and $1.7 trillion, with a middle estimate of $42.6 billion.1
Look at that range! What the hell is that? Between $200 million AND $1.7 TRILLION?And here I thought the estimates for government IT projects were wild.
Also interesting to note is that Elon Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, surpassing the middle estimate of Greenland.
Humans suck at estimation!
Estimating tasks that are too big lead to notoriously poor results. As humans, we just can’t conceptualize the immensity well. Estimating the price of Greenland is quite simply too conceptual, and estimating something that we’ve never done before is not an estimate, but an educated guess.
Estimates can suck, but are never set in stone—they’re an approximation.
Sometimes we don’t require as much as estimated. Sometimes we require more. You can add pragmatic constraints to your estimates. For this newsletter, for example, I stick to my estimates. If I see that I’m about to exceed one, I salvage what I have that’s ready for release, and discard the rest.
This is obviously not always an option.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt beyond unsure when estimating, and how many times I’ve worked on tasks that were unrealistically estimated. Just recently, I experienced someone estimating 10-30 test cases for a software change to take 2 hours. That’s blazingly fast. If the world only consisted of that guy, we’d have flying cars and time travel by now. Bro would have created AGI three years ago.
These ridiculous estimations are a major contributing factor to burnout in the workplace. They’ll make you feel like you’re not good enough if you let them.
But we should never feel like that based on a guess. Instead, we should realize they’re a tool to create momentum.
Momentum is better than perfection
Having a long-term vision is essential for achieving what you thought was not possible, but you don’t get there through a meticulous plan. You get there by planning short stretches at a time, and actioning on the feedback you receive. Bill Gates put it succinctly:
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
Set some crazy goals for yourself. Have a vague idea of the road to get there, but don’t get bogged down in the details. Take it one, small estimate at a time. If it winds up teetering on the edge of being too conceptual, ask yourself: how do I divide this into smaller sections to be conquered? Eventually, you can actually relate to the scope and find familiarity in the specificity of the task.
The key concept to keep in mind when estimating something is that estimates exist to keep us moving—to realize that momentum is better than perfection.
Imagine what you could do in 10 years, if you have the audacity to follow your grand vision, and used short-term estimation to create momentum.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_the_United_States_to_purchase_Greenland
Oh dear, I loved the hook to this post and the comparison with IT project estimates. So accurate 🤣
Great post. I’d never thought of it quite like this before. You definitely have me food for though 😀