“Real artists ship.”
An old saying at Apple Computers, often attributed to Steve Jobs, brings to light the company’s culture and the importance of delivering on product design. However there’s a deeper meaning to this quote. It speaks to life’s accomplishing goals by delievering on them. It speaks to what it means to be creative.
While it’s great to innovate, design and create, it’s also important to share and deliver to others. Sometimes this means publishing your own words, or stepping out to showcasing your photography, or verbally communicating your idea to the right people.
In order to do so, you’ll have to overcome a lot of excuses; possibly the most ensnaring is perfectism.
Perfectism will always eventually become an obstruction.
You can tweak, adjust and perfect your work as long as it’s sitting in front of you. Endlessly.
For me, this takes place mostly in my own head. Part of this is due to my INTJ personality type; where I do not feel an idea worthy of my time to flesh out until it is prepared entire in theory.
Maybe it’s perfectism, fear, lack of time, whatever excuse I want to use, ultimately it leaves the idea undelivered.
I’d like to run and exercise more, wake up earlier, be more of a morning person. I can combine these ideas into one solution, yet it remains nothing until I ship, until I stop hitting the snooze.
This site will become a dead and barren wasteland of html uselessness without content. Life is breathed into it as new content is published and continues as it’s consumed.
This site is still in the development stage…actually more of a weird combination of development and shipment. Really, right now, these posts are developing the site through the medium of shipment. I hope to truly ship the article portion of the site this week.
For a true artist, the result of creativity, architecture, infrastructure, and development needs to be shipment. Because that’s what real artists do. ”Real artists ship.”
What are you shipping?
Or maybe a better question to ask is, “What are you not shipping?”
I’m currently working on updating my graphic design / branding web site to be cleaner and more user friendly. It’s taking a while, but it’s coming along. I’m not waiting for perfection, but I do need to get more of my work up in the portfolio and get the general feel of the site down before I’m willing ship.
Are you updating live or all on the backend? You’ll have to share a before and after shot when you ship.