Lucas Parry, worship and missions leader at New Life Community Church in Asheville, NC, makes excellent points in his recent post:
Ideas are like sprints. Ideas come quickly and can disappear equally as fast. Anyone can run a sprint for a second. Danger can cause people to sprint. Urgency, deadlines, panic…all causes for sprinting.
Execution is a marathon. Marathons take time and effort. Marathons takes pacing and diligence. Marathons call for strategy, training, and endurance. No one just goes out and runs a marathon.
Successful creatives learn how to take their sprints, and turn them into marathons. Taking ideas and executing them allow organizations to achieve great things. If all we do is run sprints, we will never have the endurance that is necessary to be successful. Likewise, if all we can do is run marathons, and never develop our sprint skills, when times get tough and the race is close at the end, we will not have the ability to find that extra gear and distance ourselves from the pack.
Ideas are necessary. They are fun. They drive a lot of what we do as creatives. But without execution, ideas are not worth anything. Execution creates distance between good and great people and organizations.
Me: Very challenging, and not a little convicting!