My friend John Winsor wrote a nice post on his blog about the primacy of doing. Here's an excerpt:
Surfing has taught me that there is no substitution to repetitive practice... Everybody loves the image of surfing. Yet, I’ve discovered there are very few people who actually surf. Why is that? There is one simple answer: surfing is hard. I have a personal theory about surfing. It takes riding a thousand waves to become a surfer. It doesn’t matter if you catch 20 waves a day for 50 days or one wave a day for a thousand days; you just can’t get around the experience of learning the hard way.
At the end of this post, John asks, "If you want to be an innovator how will you ride a thousand waves?"
Do you want to achieve something amazing, or are you just here to phone in an acceptable, if ultimately forgettable, solution? Remarkable successes are born of affirmative answers to the former. Be remarkable.
Great things come from a total, unwavering commitment to being remarkable.
This 20th principle is foundational in the sense that it is an enabler of the desirable behaviors called out in all the other principles. For example:
Unless your audience understands your personal commitment to delivering remarkable end results, it's difficult to show a room of folks your half-baked prototype -- they'll only see crappy, half-baked idea.
If your boss doesn't understand your desire to ship something mind-blowing, she may not get why you are "wasting" valuable project schedule sitting out in a shopping mall, just watching people.
Seeing the world through the eyes of a child depends onthe trusting understanding of others so that your observations can be seen as inspirational, not childish.
Creating a memorable experience requires the total commitment of all contributors to the cause, for the integrity of its execution is defined by the weakest link in the system of delivery.
Failure can be allowed to suck but instruct when it happens within a culture fill with remarkable people who understand that one achieves remarkability (and stays there) via a process of personal growth fed by a constant trial and error (with an emphasis on the error).
Recognizing that the mileage a person has is more important than the years they've put in is a statement of the causal link between the primacy of doing and the pursuit of remarkability. Given a fair and open society, what and how you do far outstrips the importance of status, power, and tenure.
Being remarkable is the source of the grease we need to keep the process innovating moving along. A broad commitment to being remarkable reduces the friction, smooths out the bumps, and turbocharges the chuzpah we all need to bring cool thingsto life.
"I spent weeks thinking about and composing this. It’s very important to me, to the company, and I hope to all of you. This is a statement of the philosophy by which we are building Clover. We’re not coming to you with a product that is complete. Instead we’re hoping to engage you. We have big things we want to achieve and we’ll only be able to get there with your help.
Third, like most things Clover this wall is going to change. The white paint comes out in 3 weeks."
I'm a big fan of what Ayr Muir-Harmony has been doing with his startup Clover Food Lab over the past two years. I'm jealous, even. Ayr is incredibly gutsy, but also deeply thoughtful about how we goes about failing his way to success. His venture is all about learning by getting out there and engaging with customers in an authentic, honest, and open way.
Ayr lives Principle 5 better than just about any other person I've met.
My last post on Shinya Kimura created some great discussions, both in email, on forums across the internets, and around my workplace. That video certainly struck a deep chord with me, as it has with many other folks. Kimura combines an extremely strong point of view with a strong bias for doing, and the combination is entrancing. As I watched it again over the weekend, it made me think of two commercials which aired earlier this year, one for Jeep, the other for Corvette.
Here's the Jeep spot, which, if you listen carefully, sounds more like the manifesto for a social movement than it does an ad trying to hawk sheetmetal (and that's a Good Thing):
And then there's these amazing 45 seconds of brand building from Chevrolet:
Warning: rant approaching.
For me, the cultural zeitgeist of life in 2010 America is clearly saying "We need to start thinking with our hands again", and that we need at least to have confidence in our decision making as we seek to create things of intrinsic value -- be they forged in metal, hacked in bits, or whipped out of the air via meticulous planning and rigorous execution. It's not difficult to get to a strong, compelling point of view. That's what design thinking can do for you. But in each of these videos I sense our society expressing a strong yearning for something beyond process, the courage to make decisions and to act. Talking and thinking is easy, shipping is tough.
I think that courage comes from foundational experiences messing with stuff. We're still in hard times, undergoing a structural shift away from the economic flows which underpinned the 20th century. The imagery expressed in the Jeep and Chevy videos is from that receding economic period, which still exists here in places, but which will continue to drain away unless we can grasp the essence of what those images are saying to us. We need to start thinking with our hands again. The Corvette piece pines wistfully for Apollo rockets and the like... and implies that we can't make them anymore. Which is probably true.
However, we are indeed still creating Apollo-like icons for the future -- for example, Facebook, Google, and even the Chevy Volt -- but we certainly need more people who, like Kimura, can't keep themselves from hacking away at stuff. Tinkering, hacking, experimenting, they're all ways of experiencing the world which are more apt than not to lead to generative, highly creative outcomes. I firmly believe that kids and young adults who are allowed to hack, break, tear apart, and generally probe the world around them develop an innate sense of courage when it comes time to make a decision to actually do something. I see this all the time at Stanford: people build their creative confidence by doing things which are difficult, rather than by mastering theoretical concepts, which, though complex and difficult in and of themselves, are not transformative in a personal sense. In my training as an engineer, I took years of complex math, and it was incredibly useful to me as I applied it to thermodynamic and fluid mechanics issues I encountered as a design engineer, but nothing gave me the courage to act as the experience I had creating a casting pattern on a lathe and milling machine and then pouring molten aluminum in the negative space left by the handiwork of my mind. It was my I can do this moment. If we want more people to fall in love with the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, we need to help them have that moment, wherever and however it may come.
Brian W. Jones left a wonderful comment under my Kimura post, one which I think sums it all up really well:
“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” - Jacob Bronowski
How will you grasp the world? What can your hands tell you? We need to start thinking with our hands again.