James Dyson, the British engineer whose bagless vacuums made him one of the richest men in Britain, told Fast Company this in 2007 about the five years he spent building prototypes in a workshop. It gets quoted as a line about grit. It is a line about size.

Do the division. Five years is about 1,800 days, so 5,127 prototypes works out to nearly three a day, every day, for five years.

Nobody builds three of anything a day unless each one is small.

Dyson was not rebuilding a whole vacuum each time. His idea was a cyclone, a spinning chamber that throws dust out of the air instead of trapping it in a bag, and he changed one thing at a time: an angle, a width, a seal. Each failure took an afternoon and answered one question.

Now count yours.

The pitch deck on its eleventh revision that no investor has seen. The menu you have been redesigning since July. The pricing page you will show customers once it is ready.

That is two prototypes a year, not three a day. Each one carries so much work that a no would hurt, so you keep polishing, and polishing teaches you nothing a stranger could have told you in ten minutes.

The failure to fear is not the 5,126th. It is the first one, held back so long it got expensive.

So today: cut the thing you are protecting down to one question. Make the ugliest version that can answer it, and put it in front of one customer before Friday. A no that costs an afternoon is the cheapest lesson you will buy all year.