Speaking of the pitfalls of outsourcing important work, have you ever noticed how many so-called experts there are who’ve succeeded at virtually nothing?

Today I got an email from the CEO of a prominent local design agency, announcing yet another book. This guy drives me crazy.

In my experience, startups over rely on agencies.

Don’t get me wrong—agencies can be fantastic for one-off, timeboxed work. Projects like designing the company logo or building a one-off tool are great fits for agencies. They’re discrete pieces of work with a clear start and end. While they may be important, they probably won’t make or break the company.

But too often startups rely on agencies for their most important work.

James Clear has an excellent article on what he calls the 3 Stages of Failure.

In it, he differentiates between tactical failures, strategic failures, and failures of vision:

Stage 1 is a Failure of Tactics. These are HOW mistakes. They occur when you fail to build robust systems, forget to measure carefully, and get lazy with the details. A Failure of Tactics is a failure to execute on a good plan and a clear vision.

Stage 2 is a Failure of Strategy. These are WHAT mistakes. They occur when you follow a strategy that fails to deliver the results you want. You can know why you do the things you do and you can know how to do the work, but still choose the wrong what to make it happen.

Stage 3 is a Failure of Vision. These are WHY mistakes. They occur when you don’t set a clear direction for yourself, follow a vision that doesn’t fulfill you, or otherwise fail to understand why you do the things you do.

Highlighting this nuance is incredibly insightful. Knowing what’s holding you back is the first step to moving forward.

But I think Clear is missing a stage of failure here: Failures of Circumstance.

From a UX perspective, there are at least two kinds of nitpicking.

There’s more power in these words than you might imagine.

Most customers understand, and even expect, some mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. What frustrates people isn’t the mistake, it’s the justification, the refusal to acknowledge the error, or the compounding of the error.

This weekend I had the unenviable task of creating a mostly static website at the last minute.

The site needed to look nice and have some basic functionality, so I wanted to use LESS CSS and the more modern ES6+ version of JavaScript.

When developing a marketing strategy, it’s important to know the difference between gimmicks and hooks.

Most shortcuts are more trouble than they’re worth.

When you’re stuck in an Uber with a driver using Waze, zipping in and out of side streets to save a minute here and a minute there, you’re liable to get there slower than you would have otherwise.

It might seem faster, and occasionally it actually is, but most of the time you hit more lights, more stop signs, and more traffic.

When your business takes shortcuts, the same thing happens.

Many of us agree I can’t is one of the worst phrases in the English language.

But how many of us have spent enough time developing the resilience to say I can even after we fail time and time again?