Imagine all the work you put in over the course of a year to accomplish a project and ship a release, the hours upon hours of coding and testing to make something happen. Think of all the beta releases and customer trials that you went through to make sure things worked.
Now go back even further and envision this as the version 1.0 release where you are coming into an already populated field and there are so many features that simply need to be there, for the past few months you’ve heard the following phrases over and over again…
“These are table stakes, we can’t ship without it”
“How can you not put those features in, everyone else has them”
“Don’t bother if you aren’t going to get it right”
So from there you keep working, you keep retooling, you keep iterating something new that was not there before and you get the point where you have everyone your competitors have, but you’ve taken a different approach, maybe switched up the User Interface a bit, added some extra bells and whistles to the project and perhaps and tried to be something different, something better.
And then upon release it gets ravaged, ruined and destroyed by others who maybe didn’t quite see your vision, where it’s going, all that you were trying to do.
Now what do you do?
Quit?
Move On?
Go into a corner and wait for the sun to rise tomorrow?
Or do you keep pushing your vision, slowly converting people to something new, something different and possibly something better?
Where did this come from? I saw Batman vs Superman, after the critical response and massive drop in numbers. The theatre I was in was practically empty. After everyone was saying it was so bad and I went into it with no expectations but appreciating all the risks that were taken to make something different, tell a different story, lay the groundwork for so much and try to do it all in 2+ hours.
Followers don’t get the critical treatment, leaders who try to differentiate themselves, always do.
