On shipping excellence
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Working with my clients, I am constantly reminded that shipping excellence is really really hard. The journey from idea to shipping something truly special is long and winding.
Note: I’m not quite sure how to categorise this post, nor what to call it. It touches on something very important and central to my work — how to recognise and groom those bits of our work that have potential. When to stick with it, when to shift and even when to give up.
Working with my clients, I am constantly reminded that shipping excellence is really really hard. The journey from idea to shipping something truly special is long and winding.
If you’re lucky enough to stumble into that something special early, for example with an already almost excellent idea or prototype, you will be drawn to start guarding it. To start protecting it. You may slip into the mindset of scarcity and defend it so long that your work loses power. You go through every following stage protecting, fearing you could lose that spark in your work any time now.
But great work is never born in protection. It is forged in fires of courage and candour. Being courageous at the beginning and then falling back makes our ideas, our products, our businesses weak. They will never stand the trials of the real world. We need to continue to take risks and test our ideas against the real world as much as possible. The sooner we find their weaknesses — the better. It can hurt, it feels vulnerable, but it’s much cheaper than a slow death of an idea.
Then there’s achieved excellence.
In his book, Creativity, Inc., Pixar president Ed Catmull, writes that their famously excellent movies are completely and utterly bad in the beginning. As Catmull explains, the real creative process is taking that initial spark that started the project and realising it through thousands of decisions and points of improvement over a long period of time.
Just imagine. Working long hours on something rather bad and uninteresting, for weeks, maybe months. Every day making it a little bit, even just 1%, better. Then one day you hit a milestone. It’s no longer bad, it’s just ‘OK’ now. But after that months of work will still pass, people will continue collaborating, money will be spent. You’ll eventually…
