Some of you have noticed that I’m no longer on the sidebar of this blog — but I haven’t gone away. I’ll be back from time to time as a guest author, and often as a reader. Why the change? Well, I followed my own advice, offered here:

Stop shipping.

Or rather stop just shipping.

“Shipping,” (Seth Godin’s term for getting over fears and getting things done) is important, of course — so many of us stop well short of turning what we say we’ll do into what we actually do.

But ticking a box or crossing something off a list just isn’t enough. Not really.

When you focus only on shipping, you deliver what’s required, but not what’s expected. You follow the script precisely, and miss the point completely. You satisfy the order, but not the need.

See, there’s a huge difference between “shipping” and “fulfilling.” “Shipping” is about getting something out the door, but “fulfilling” is about realizing potential — about meeting (and maximizing) expectations, about eliminating the gap between what is and what could be.

One’s a transaction, the other’s a relationship — with your customers, your partner, yourself.

No, you can’t fulfill all the time, nor for everything (though I’d certainly argue for that as an ideal, but most of us — me included — aren’t that rigorous in our prioritizing). There are often times when getting pebbles out of the way allows you to move boulders. But just as often, there are times when our focus on the little means we’ve lost sight of the big.

And yes, fulfilling is hard. It’s much harder than shipping, partly because it includes shipping.

It’s harder because it’s about becoming, not just doing. It’s harder because it’s not about being done, it’s about continuing to do — and understanding why and how we do it. It’s harder because it requires action and acceptance. It requires us to stop and think. To reevaluate. To take risks. To anticipate. To choose.

It’s harder because it means we have to stretch beyond what is and make the jump. And keep jumping.

Fulfilling means abandoning the rote. It means questioning what we’ve always done, especially if that’s why we continue to do it. It means questioning what’s expected of us. It means questioning those things we do simply because we think (or are told) we “should”, or because it was a decision we made once upon a time. Because we’d already “shipped.”

But fulfilling means shaking off the tyranny of “should,” and finding your own path to what is, what needs to be, and what deserves to be…right now.

And shipping — just shipping — will never get you there.

So: ship? Or fulfill? 

It’s time to choose.

Image: Louis Abate