I work with some brilliant people.
Each one teaches me something new.
About a year back, Miguel asked me a strange question: “Are you 1000% sure?”
I thought I was. The feature worked. The code was clean. Time to ship.
But that question stuck.
Because here’s the thing about being sure: it’s comfortable. It lets us move on. It protects us from the hard work of looking again.
100% sure is what we tell ourselves when we’re done looking.
1000% sure is what happens when we choose to look anyway.
We found bugs I missed. Features that could vanish without anyone noticing. Edge cases I didn’t think existed.
Now I test differently.
Multiple rounds. Fresh sessions. No cache. Clean slate thinking.
The number doesn’t matter. The question does.
It forces a pause. A double take. A moment to consider what you decided not to see.
Most mistakes don’t come from not knowing. They come from stopping too soon.
Being 1000% sure isn’t about perfection. It’s about exhausting your curiosity before you exhaust your user’s patience.
It means you did everything you could think of in that moment. Not everything possible. Just everything you could imagine.
I use this everywhere now.
Before that email goes out. Before the client call. Before making promises I might regret.
The gap between sure and really sure?
It’s one more look. One more question. One more moment of honest doubt.
That’s where the good stuff hides.
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