No guts, no glory

I saw Avatar this weekend and in typical good story form, the character had to overcome impossible odds to achieve a goal that was bigger than himself. Donald Miller would say this is also what makes a good and meaningful life. It takes guts to face impossible odds. There are risks and you may be ridiculed for your resolve and belief, but when you stand firm and see it through the rewards can be great.

I wonder if this is also what makes an interesting and impactful company. Apple, for example, has the guts to stand by their vision, their "higher calling". They don't follow, they lead. They don't worry about comparing themselves to anyone else, they have a vision of how things should be and they push to make it happen no matter what "they" think.

Apple just released the iPad, which no one asked for and which falls short of other products in so many ways. It plays movies yet does not support 1080 resolution, it is not pocketable, memory is not expandable, it has no camera so no video chat, no flash support, you can't replace the battery or anything for that matter, there is no stylus so it's not an artist's pad, it can only run one application at a time. Yet it's simple, relatively cheap, fast, and can run for 10 hours untethered. Apple knew what they wanted. They avoided the mistake of trying to make everyone happy. They did not try to play catch-up with other slate products or even netbooks. They defined their own market, targeted their own audience, and went for it. There is no guarantee it will succeed but taking a risk is the only way to make a real difference.

It takes guts to stand up and be different. It takes guts to stick to your vision even when others don't believe. There are more risks doing things this way, but there are also much richer rewards.

Some companies try to keep up with the crowd, others know where they want to go and blaze their own trail.

Which company would you rather work for?

Which life would you rather live?

Do hard things

I have noticed a disturbing trend in people working hard to find the easiest way to get a job done. My problem is not with a desire for efficiency, it's with pushing to make a marginal solution. The question becomes "What is the bare minimum I could do and still get credit for doing something?" or "What is the smallest feature set we can give the client to get them off our backs?". Instead the question needs to be "How can we knock their socks off and still deliver on time?"

In reality, if we are not striving to do the best and taking opportunity to surprise clients by going beyond what they expected, we are just plodding along punching a clock and collecting a paycheck. Not very inspiring. What excites people is knowing they are building something great, something that matters. The only way to do that is by doing something hard.

One of our engineers spent much of last weekend solving a hard problem. We had decided we could compromise the solution to get it done in time and it would still work OK for most people. None of us were proud of that choice, but what else could we do? By spending his own time, this engineer was able to solve the hard problem and deliver a feature that we can be proud of.

What are you most proud of? I'll bet it is the things that you worked hard to accomplish. If you find yourself trying to figure out how to get out of doing something hard, you may still get a paycheck but you are robbing yourself of the greatest prize - knowing you accomplished something that matters. Don't shy away from the challenges. Hit them head on.

Do hard things.