How important is creativity to your success as Web-entrepreneur, or in any business venture? Look around, do creative people tend to be wealthier or more successful business people?

Lets look at two prominent pioneers in the computer business, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Bill, and his company, have reached the highest level of success, but they have never generated a single original idea. Bill started out by reverse-engineering a disk operating system, and then selling it (to IBM if I recall correctly, something called DOS). Next he took the advances being made at Palo Alto’s computer lab in GUI (Graphical User Interface) design, and watered it down and called it Windows.

Every time a creative company came up with some useful feature, Microsoft just copied the idea by writing software just different enough to avoid losing major lawsuits, and incorporating the feature into their software suite.

Steve, on the other hand, is a creative genius,  who surrounded himself with other creative geniuses, and produced one ground-breaking development after another in the world of computers. But those computers were not particularly well marketed, more expensive to make (and hence buy) than the generic boxes Windows runs on, and hence never reached as large a market share as they might have deserved.

Now Steve is no pauper, so don’t misconstrue what I’m saying into suggesting creative people can’t succeed in business. I’m just saying that creativity is rarely well-rewarded in business.

Part of the problem is that creative people tend to be perfectionists. They spend too much time getting every imaginable bug out of their software, for example, while Microsoft puts out untested junk and lets user feedback provide their testing results — then they charge those customers again when they want to upgrade to the  ‘new improved’ version that works like the original should have.

Of course you have to develop a lot of clout in your field before you can get away with those kind of shenanigans,  but even in everyday business striving for perfection can be a project-killer. No, I’m not saying you should have shoddy products, but once your product is good enough to meet your customers need, stop improving on it and start selling it!

Many people confuse quality with perfection. You should always strive to achieve the highest quality you practically can — but if further quality improvements mean you never get to market with your product, it has gone beyond high quality and into perfectionism.