Daily Inspiration: “The ability to imagine the future is a gift. The tenacity to make it become real is a skill.”

“The ability to imagine the future is a gift. The tenacity to make it become real is a skill.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Real artists ship.

That’s the legendary comment made by Steve Jobs at an offsite corporate office leadership event; the Macintosh team was discussing the ongoing effort to develop the new computer that would disrupt the personal computer world. As the story goes:

So he stood at an easel at one end of a long, narrow conference room and unveiled the first of three epigrams:

Real artists ship.

They were all artists. They knew that. But real artists don’t hang on to their creations. Real artists ship. Matisse shipped. Picasso shipped. They were going to ship too.

Real artists ship? They don’t just come up with ideas – they deliver those ideas to the world as something new, revolutionary, groundbreaking. They ship.

It’s one thing to have an idea. It’s another to make it work. It’s great to have a vision of the future – but it’s a rare individual who can actually make it come true. Everyone lives within the boundaries of their visions – but it seems that only a successful few can see it through to completion.

What gets in the way of the delivery of great ideas? Corporate inertia, bureaucracy, routine, skepticism, cynicism – the disease that is at the root of all innovation failure. In other cases, barriers come about due to a focus on small details, a drive for perfection, or a project scope that is simply too large to succeed. Sometimes, the way forward will not be clear because the path ahead is clouded by a tendency to cling to the same direction as what has worked in the past.

There are simply too many things that can get in the way of success. To deal with this, you need to be relentless tenacious; it’s your weapon of choice, your friend in delivery. How do you ship? Examine your tenacity, your drive, your conviction, and your determination. Do you all too easily back away from the potential ideas that matter, or do you try to push on through? Do you let the naysayers hold you back, or do you ignore them? Do you let the challenges you face and the barriers in your way slow your momentum, or do you do everything you can to break through them?

Real artists ship. Do you?