Most people know how Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony begins: DUM—DUM—DUM DUHH! DUM—DUM—DUM DUHH! Dramatic but simple. Four notes.

Listen to it in full and you’ll notice the distinctive quality of all great creative works continues throughout: a sort of inherent rightness as Leonard Bernstein called it, or inevitability.

When we experience such things we imagine their creator must have downloaded them from some divine realm. That the result must have arrived instantaneously, fully formed and flawless. Yet this is not true.

Beethoven's sketchbooks show him experimenting and agonizing over his ideas for eight years. He re-wrote one of the main melodies fourteen times, scribbling and scratching out versions until it was just right.

Creating something of enduring value takes time. And even masters of their craft must have freedom to experiment and iterate to produce their best work.

Often what separates the very best from the rest is the willingness and support to persevere until whatever it is, it just works. Until the solution feels so right that any alternative feels wrong. Until our products fit so well into the customer's life that their presence is felt most by their absence.

That’s what greatness looks like: obvious, inevitable, and the difficulty involved, invisible.

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