The other day I was looking at this thing online and my job (that day) was to improve the user’s experience when using that thing.  I was hired to do this.  I was asked to, “Please make it work more and cause fewer complaints.”  So I set about the task of “fixing” it.

Along the way, and across many iterations, I realized that the routine had become mechanical.  I was taking this thing and changing the pieces that didn’t seem right.  I didn’t have a master plan for the final outcome, and the thought punched me in the face:  I often don’t.

Great works of art, engineering, and business are architected; designed with an entire system in mind, with all the rules known beforehand, and the expectations for the final prodcut  clear.  I am rarely blamed for great things.  Instead, what I produce most of the time simply works.  Nothing more,  nothing less,  and people keep hiring me to do it, suckers.

But if you consistenly produce things that work and rarely produce something that doesn’t work, even if they aren’t breathtakingly great — the track record, itself, becomes impressive.

Take the Inverse

My take on learning to do things you don’t know how to do is simple:  figure out what you shouldn’t do, and don’t.

As I was working on this job the other day, my “method” (if we can call it that) was to change something until I knew it wasn’t wrong.  Then move on to the next thing and reevaluate.  While the day would have gone faster if I’d done this particular work before, and I would have had a picture of what the product should look like at the end, I just didn’t have the experience.  So I did the next best thing.  I took the inverse of “make it work” and instead did “make it unbroken”.  There is an important difference between the two.

If you don’t know how to create a great resume, keep working until it’s not awful.  If you aren’t an artist and you have graphics to create, work until it’s not ugly.  Writing a good business plan simply means writing one that isn’t bad.

The only real requirement here is that you should have the most basic set of rules to work within.  For instance, if you’ve never created a resume you know at least the following:

• A resume is a document you turn in to represent your best qualities (usually to get a job).
• You have to talk about your experience, and
• Highlight the things you’be been recognized for.

Basic rules, right?  So to proceed, I would look at some examples (if they were available) and then ponder what a resume shouldn’t be:

• Boring
• Ugly
• Shouldn’t have cuss words.
• Smudged…

And so on.  Obviously you can break it down any way you like, but to get a decent, working resume, start with the basic rules and avoid the bad stuff.  Again, nothing less and nothing more than working.

Multiply by n

This system of taking the inverse of the optimal solution (knowing what it should be), and revisiting it until it doesn’t suck is probably not how great things are built.  Mozart, Galileo, Bobby Fisher, Pascal — those guys probably had a vision of their goal and moved toward it dodging obstacles along the way.  The rest of us, if you adopt my thinking, do it over and over fixing tiny things to make it suck less until you have a final product of minimal suckage.

Sometimes, all we need to do is make a problem smaller in order to find a great solution.

Problems

There are is a hefty handful of problems with this method.  It’s slow, it can be discouraging, and it’s certainly not as efficient as already knowing what you’re doing.

“…starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.” – Paul Graham

But really, if you want to learn how to do something you don’t know how to do, what better place to start than avoiding what you know you shouldn’t do?  If you actively reevaluate your own work for “suckage” you’ll learn more about the process than if someone had taught it to you, and you’ll be at least twice as good the next time.