How is this thing you’re showing me going to improve my life?

It’s easy to be a genius inside your head.

Because you’re still winking in the dark. You’re still the tree that falls in the forest.

But as you approach the publication or release or launch date of your work, you start to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head.

And it’s terrifying. As the audio engineer at my recording studio once told me, your songs always sound like a hits inside your head and in your dreams, but in the cold light of the playback room, shit gets real. The speakers teach you who you really you are.

It’s the hostile nature of the creative journey. Everything has two births. First as an idea, aka, creativity, and then as the real and tangible output of that idea in the world, aka, innovation. And the gap between those two events is where people get tripped up. With each step we take closer to launch, the stronger the resistance grows.

Just keep asking the question:

How is this thing you’re showing me going to improve my life?

Hell, anybody can win an argument about their product inside their head, but when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing. Nothing happens until a sales is made, and nobody knows how good your product is until they give you money.

Guess the only way to know what happens next is to do it.

And to adjust course to accommodate new forces we encounter along the way.

Are you willing to let go of the reassuring lie and face the cold reality?