We all have that friend who is super creative and has great ideas, but always waits and waits to make those creations perfect.
Or maybe that friend is us.
We constantly miss deadlines or push back meetings because our ideas are never quite perfect enough.
This is being afraid to ship.
“Real artists ship.”
That is a great quote from Steve Jobs and it has nothing to do with painting a picture or sailing the ocean.
When Jobs said it, he meant that whenever you create something, it is important to deliver that something to a someone (he put it much better than I just did).
Jobs was super creative but was ultra successful because he was not afraid to ship.
He could have worked perpetually on his Apple products, always trying to make them perfect, but that would do him no good unless he produced something that would eventually be delivered to users.
French writer Voltaire summed up this idea when he said, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
If you spend all your time trying to be perfect, you will never be successful because no one will ever see it.
Author Jon Acuff puts it another way when he says, “90 percent of perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.”
How ever you want to say it, the message is the same.
We all can use our gifts of imagination to do some amazing things. But it does no good to keep those ideas stuck in our imagination.
Real artists ship.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
