I recently listened to Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs, in which the reader (or in my case the listener) is treated to a behind the scenes view of the rise of Apple, Inc. and the role played by its founder.  One of the most memorable moments in the book comes when only a week before the scheduled launch of the Macintosh a  small team of engineers and designers approaches Jobs to let him know they won’t be able to make the deadline.  In an effort to rally and cajole his team to meet the deadline, he exclaims, “Real Artists Ship!”

The concept was that it doesn’t matter if you’re the most creative person in the world if you can’t deliver on that creativity.  There are no shortages of accounts in Isaacon’s book that suggest Jobs was a lover of creative thinking and artistic design –some might say he held that in higher regard than anything else –but this particular instance indicates his clear understanding on the value of delivering the goods –on setting a deadline and sticking to it, no matter what.

All too often in life (with the exception of legal filing deadlines during my years as a litigator) I have been soft on deadlines.  Whether it’s with myself or with people who are reporting to me.  I adopt an “okay, we can push it back one more week,” mentality, believing, like Jobs’s engineers that one more read through of a contract or one more week spent practicing tennis before a big match is going to make a substantive difference.  Jobs’s point, however, was that it does not matter if you have written the perfect contract or crafted the perfect forehand volley if you can’t get out there and share it with the world.  The reason “real artists ship,” is that you only know about the artists that actually sat down and delivered their work –the others, well, they weren’t artists, they were just dreamers.   So set your deadlines for yourself and your team and stick to them!  Real Artists Ship!

If you’d like to read a firsthand account of what it was like trying to meet the Mac software deadline, you can do so here, where Andy Hertzfeld shares his perspective on running under the gun of Steve Jobs.