Everybody emphasizes the Shipping part, but I think Artist should be the operative word.
After all, just look at the sheer volume of crap that gets made and shipped.
Shipping is common. Artists are rare.
“Real artists ship” sounds obvious and inevitable coming out of Steve Jobs’ mouth, but can you imagine any other tech manager calling their engineers artists?
Would your boss ever call you an artist? Would you ever call yourself one?
In the practical arts like engineering, design, and architecture, an artist is someone who displays an uncompromising obsession with quality, even if their work is invisible, and damn the consequences:
Yvon Chouinard’s hard steel climbing spikes were the foundation of his business, but they damaged the rocks in Yosemite. Instead of taking the easy path, Chouinard stopped selling the old stuff and invented new climbing equipment that sold better, performed better, and saved Yosemite’s rocks.
Steve Jobs is a product genius, and Jonathan Ive is an industrial design genius, but there’s more to it than that. Everything I’ve read about Apple’s culture says that Steve Jobs’ obsession with quality drives everything. So many crap products get made because artists don’t drive most companies: MBAs, lawyers, office politics, bean counters, and shareholders do.
Consider this story about master carpenter Tsunekazu Nishioka:
“I watched four senior carpenters standing at attention, silently accepting a stiff rebuke from the master. Their crime: someone had miscalculated a few millimeters on a hip rafter. The difference was hardly noticeable, even close up, but since the beam was designed to achieve its perfect form only after several years of sagging and shrinking, this small error would be magnified and possibly distort the whole. Fumed Nishioka, ‘They’ll laugh at me. They’ll say, “That’s not the way a hip rafter should look!’ And I won’t be around to defend myself.”
I bet most of us are inspired by that kind of commitment, but we don’t practice it in our work. How could we when most jobs are about not rocking the boat, punching a clock, avoiding blame, and making deadlines. In other words most jobs are about shipping, not making art.
So how do we get from just shipping to shipping art? I’m wrestling with this personally right now, and it’s not easy. The fixes are obvious, but they’re also terribly difficult because they require courage and sustained effort over time.
Notes:
- See Folklore.org for stories about Apple’s early days and the origins of “real artists ship”.
- I first read the anecdote about Tsunekazu Nishioka in one of my favorite books: How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. See also: The genius of Japanese carpentry by Azby Brown.
- Yet more: Ira Glass on taste and quality.