When you’ve been an entrepreneur long enough, one thing is for sure: you have to ship or die. Whatever product or service you offer, as long as there’s a viable market for it, you’re in business.
You stay in business as long as you keep producing or serving to meet the demand that identifies your particular market, whether it’s left-handed scissors, specialty wax seals, or antique car detailing. And if you truly are fully engaged with these things, and get to make a living out of that engagement, then more power to you.
There is a caveat, though.
“Follow your passion,” overlooks the goal of your work.
It’s easy to overlook that the root word of ‘passion‘ comes from the Latin for ‘suffering.’ Following your passion is easy to say; it’s just three words anyway, but the sentence doesn’t cover what happens after, and that’s where many people stumble. Pipe dreams die easily when you apply hard logic to them, and for many who prefer the dream, they can come unprepared for the hard work of making it into a reality.
See, the hard part is that some parts of the dream won’t make it, so you need to let them go.
“Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.” – Erica Jong, author
Now, let’s take about productivity, and how it ties in to “ship or die.”
One idea you have to learn to relinquish is the thought of a perfect product. If you have trouble releasing a product to face the public, have you ever really tried to answer the question, “When will it be good enough?” definitively? Do you have a protocol for bug fixes and releases, but have a habit of being slow on the actual launching? Continue reading Get Your Product Out The Door