Different can hit deeper

My pal Jesse Thomas posted this on his blog. Its a heartfelt, artistic, creative and just lovely tribute to Obama. But its not just a tribute to Obama – its a tribute to doing something very differently.

It redefines the bar for political videos or ads. It follows no formula. I’m not (necessarily) an Obama person.

If we’re striving to be transformational – to knock it completely out of the park, we need to be willing to reconceive the status quo. Its difficult to describe a product to someone without using something else as a frame of reference. But its impossible to create something transformational by using something else as a standard. I’m sure a guy could say something about that huge Giants play in the Super Bowl here that would be apropos. All I can say is that this video, for a presidential candidate, is a million times better than anything that came before it, and bears almost no resemblance to any other political ad I’ve ever seen.

The painfully obvious corollary point: Just because the successful people all do it a certain way doesn’t mean we all should. “Bill Clintons ads all do this”. “Facebook does it this way”. “Well, that’s the standard”. I just don’t want to hear it.

The old way is fine, and can suffice, can be improved upon and leveraged. But if you’re thinking bigger, If you have passion, if you have vision, you can do it different and make something that is so much better. Of course this isn’t enough to be successful. You still need to connect that vision to the market. You need to find a channel to that market, and you need to make it useful and fabulous. But its one of those necessary (if insufficient) components.

The Mac, Sesame Street, Catch 22, Craigslist, Google and on and on. What’s the most different and most successful re-thinking of a product that you’ve seen?

Passion is a best practice.

Want to build something great? You have to want it. Bad.

Here are some somewhat random thoughts about passion, quality, genius and boredom and mediocrity.

Greatness is rarely achieved by accident. It is the result of a pure vision, refined over time and developed with care and purpose. I do not believe that it is possible to develop a truly great product without at least one very influential visionary on the team. Why?

Well – on the way to any goal, there are about a million little decisions and tradeoffs that need to be made. Without a vision, a North Star, as they liked to say at Adobe, those tradeoffs end up in a bland compromise.

But we have to compromise! Of course we do – we need to make decisions. But with a clarity of vision and purpose, those decisions make a product stronger, not weaker.

Without vision, its hard to care, to offer the attention to detail necessary to make it perfect. Pure discipline is a hard way to attend to the details. We need discipline in everything we do – of course, but discipline fueled by passion is incredibly powerful. Discipline supported by sheer force of will – well its just hard to maintain and sustain.

An interesting micro-cosmical example of this happened at Startup Weekend a couple of months ago. Various ideas were pitched and discarded, and the one startup idea that was voted in was a site that enabled micro-social networking for neighborhood communities. The problem? The guy with the idea split shortly after the vote. Leaving the rest of the people – even those who thought it had been a good idea – looking around for what was special about it, and what would make it more than yet another social networking site. We eventually came up with a couple of reasonable value propositions that we bickered about a bit, and ended up spending the weekend working on features that were neither here nor there.

Now – this was a situation where it really didn’t matter much. The point of the weekend was to see if we could launch something, learn, have some fun. All of which we did – and it was a FANTASTIC and wholy worthwhile experience that I hope I can repeat someday. But. It made a great little expose on why a little passion goes a long way.

On the flip side. When I worked at AOL, oh so many years ago, we launched an online calendar. In those days, an online calendar was still a new-ish thing, and AOL was still the leading provider of consumer internet access. But our little calendar was sweet. Every detail was lovingly designed, debated and improved. We had a crystal clear notion of what we were building and why, and what we wanted it to become someday. The team had a huge spark of creative endeavor. For a calendar. Its not the product – its the passion behind it.

What’s your passion? What’s fueling your creativity? What will make your next product great, not just there?