What I talk about when I talk about being better
What are your goals when setting out to build a new product?
Our goals are very simple - to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it.
Why has Apple’s competition struggled to do that?
(…) A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different - they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.
Jony Ive, talking about the design process at Apple.
I don’t know how many times I repeated this mantra, and in so many different situations, be it my job, writing, painting, being a Software Engineer or coming up with that amazing idea for an application.
People will say that the secret is connections. Or luck (how I hate that one). Or that what you need is just marketing or an agent. What will make it, are good presentation skills to convince those business angels to give you the money you need. That you just need advertising.
And yet just imagine if your energy would be focused on excelling at your craft, and having high standards for what you do; caring for doing something that is better – not just different for the sake of being different, but essentially for the sake of being better.
All those things above are important, but commiting to being better, really better, that is just inescapably necessary.