Imagine being asked to climb a mountain.

You gaze at the snow-capped peak and you are excited to undertake the adventure. Your instructor tells you there is a reward for reaching the summit. This only fuels your desire to get on the trail. You gather all the supplies you will need for travel and you place the burden on your back as you prepare to take the first step in your journey. You grab your walking stick and begin to take a step. “Hold on,” your instructor says. “I forget to mention the most important part of this journey. You can only walk in the dark and the only light you can use is a flashlight. You will also walk alone.” What? This has to be the strangest journey you have ever considered, but there is that reward waiting at the top. So what do you do while you wait for darkness to descend? If you’re smart you work to burn into your mind what that mountain looks like and you try to pick out where you need to go on your way to getting your reward. You do this so that when darkness comes you still have a picture of the mountain even though the only thing you can see is the next step in front of you. Each step guides you closer to your reward, but the only clear picture you can rely on is the one that is burned into your mind from the valley below. This is a fairly accurate picture of what it is like to engage in product creation. The reward waiting is the actual product available for sale, but the only clear picture you have of the end result is a dream you believed in prior to the journey from thought to actual product. You can research all you want to help you see where to take the next step, but that step may lead to another location where more research is needed before taking another step forward.

This process is very much like trying to climb a mountain in the dark; you know where you want to go you just can’t see clearly how to get there.

Product creation is not for the faint of heart and it’s not for the weak of will because no matter how much research and work you put into the product the end result provides no assurances that the product will be a best seller. The reward may simply be in proving to yourself that you were strong enough to follow through with something enormously difficult and at the conclusion you tangibly held what had once been a dream. For most this moment opens doors that are more important long-term than our ability to engage in product creation because this act says a lot about our ability, tenacity and follow through. After all, anyone can have a dream, but very few do something about it. If you are in the midst of product creation you have undertaken a noble endeavor and one that perhaps only you were destined to accomplish.