I was thinking about Inspiration and Perspiration yesterday and added a couple more.
Inspiration is a beautiful thing. You have an idea, you pluck it out of the air and you put it in your pocket. Through the sharing of your body heat, it starts to germinate, sending out a shoot which will reach out and actually change the way you think.
Perspiration is when you realise that it’s going to take a lot of effort to fully realise this idea. You will lose sleep, you will lose money, you will lose friends. You might keep your hair. But you enjoy the work because it’s in the creation of something special, something that is yours.
Exasperation is when you spend a lot of time fixing the edge cases in your idea. Whether it’s hardware, software, services or whatever – there will always be circumstances when you’re forced to spend 80% of your time working on 20% of the problem.
Desperation is when you realise your competitor is six weeks ahead of you. Or handled an all too frequent error condition a lot better. Or a customer is so pleased with your work, that his system uptime is so good, that he decides he doesn’t need you any more.