Archive for the ‘Steve Jobs’ tag
Real Artists (Plan to) Ship
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Ed. note: This post is appropriate because we’re “shipping” our son to the world in just a few hours. Wish us luck! Posting may be slow for a little while as we adjust to a bigger family, but if you’re signed up for email updates, Twitter, or RSS, you may not even notice!
If you work in the tech industry, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, “Real artists ship”. It’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs, the founder and current CEO of Apple, as a motivator for the development team of the original Macintosh computer.
In this context, shipping means getting your product out the door and into the hands of the world. But it could mean submitting your term paper, completing a big sale, or finishing a year-long boat renovation. Life is full of projects like these that could go on indefinitely, but ultimately have to ship in order to make a difference.
If these projects don’t ship, they’re just hobbies. If they don’t ship, they were just fun ideas – and ideas are a dime a dozen… everyone has good ideas. But shipping… that’s hard. And the rewards of shipping are reserved for the few that are able to do it, not the people who first thought of the idea.
The “problem” with starting a project with the expectation that it’ll ship is that it imposes all sorts of constraints. The technology isn’t where you need it to be, you don’t have the time you need to do everything you want to do, or you don’t have the people or money. In order to truly think “outside the box” you need a team that’s twice as big with twice as much money and faster computers! Of course that’s all bogus.
Constraints are why things ship.
If you didn’t have a deadline to submit your term paper, you could tweak it forever. If you didn’t have customers waiting for the next version of your software or competitors breathing down your neck, you could add every feature you’ve ever thought of. You need constraints to really think about how to best solve a problem. Constraints are good.
