Creators Versus Editors
There are people who are remembered as true innovators in their field, redefining what excellence looks like. They change how the world sees their industry or art or genre. Often the innovation that comes from these people isn’t splurged forth in a moment of creative clarity or produced in a steady hum of genius. These people are editors; taking the mediocrity that others create, or creating crap themselves, and then relentlessly editing, tweaking, honing, refining, scrapping, molding, fixing, polishing until the final product is a masterpiece.
“I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.” - David Ogilvy
Steve Jobs, in his unrivaled perfectionism, actually created very little in his life. He was, as is widely known, The Tweaker. He was unbending in his mission to perfect what others had created. It was his Achilles’ heal in the 1980s before he was ousted from Apple. It was what made NeXT both remarkable and impossibly unprofitable. And it’s what made the iPod, iPhone, iPad and a slew of other revolutionary products at Apple after the turn of the millennium possible.
While the world needs creators, it’s the editors that change things.
