Square Pegs And Round Holes
Limitations and Finite Resources Can Be The Best Catalyst For Success
A small group of engineers huddle around a table covered with discarded pieces of tubing, a NASA space suit, duct tape, random wires, etc. The lead engineer holds up a basketball-sized cube-type device in one hand. In his other hand, he holds a cylindrical device that looks much like a large coffee thermos. We are informed that these are two different kinds of air filters. He explains that to save the lives of the three astronauts currently trapped in space, they have to create an adapter for the cubic filter so that it fits into the receptacle for the cylindrical filter. The trick is that they can only build this adapter device using the junk and spare parts tossed out onto the table. This isn't a practice problem. It’s a real-life or death problem. The engineers come through.
Referencing this moment from the movie Apollo-13 wasn't to point out how experts can perform on a level above the rest of us. My point here was that they had finite resources and the general expectation of failure was the default outcome. Any successful solution was better than none and would be considered a win.
Learning new skills often comes with the daunting feeling of inadequacy. I think this is especially true for adults who have spent much of their lives trying to develop skills in a particular profession. Realizing the difficulty in learning something new can cause feelings of incompetency. There is some dissonance here when you already know you are very competent in so many other things, especially your profession. This feeling of deficiency can be a huge hurdle to overcome if not an outright roadblock. However, just like the engineers in that scene from Apollo 13, there is a great benefit to overcoming these roadblocks by giving yourself limited resources and limited tools to complete a task. In this sense, the expectation stops being the creation of something perfect. The new expectation is simply to make something.
When confronted with too many degrees of freedom, individuals often find themselves mired in stagnation and a dearth of forward momentum. The abundance of choices and possibilities can overwhelm and paralyze, leading to a state of indecision and inaction. I've made the mistake of getting sucked into the draw of some new hobby or skill such that I've spent a lot of money on tools and resources and then realized how terrible I am at what I've attempted. This happens because even though I know I'm a complete novice, there is a part of me that holds greater expectations because of the expensive tools I've acquired.
Too many options and expensive gear gives an expectation of great work or achievement. When this doesn't happen (because my skills aren’t up to par with my tools), the sense of failure is disheartening when weighed against the seriousness of the financial investment. However, if you can switch your mindset such that failure is the likely outcome. Having few tools and few resources limits both the quality and quantity of your work product. So anything completed at all, is a small success, even if it is sub-par because sub-par was the best thing that could be hoped for.
Woodworking and Design
I can barely hammer a nail into a piece of wood. I have no woodworking or carpentry skills whatsoever. I recently got sucked into the idea of getting started in the craft of woodworking. Past experience has taught me that buying a bunch of expensive tools is a sure way to crush my chances of being successful. To avoid this I decided to give myself limited degrees of freedom.
I forced myself to have limited resources, limited tools, and limited expenses.
I would watch a bunch of videos online to learn about making wood joints, structures, etc.
I would learn about the different tools and what they are used for.
I would learn alternative ways of building similar designs.
I began gathering discarded pallets and wood from different reclamation sources and began storing the wood for possible use (no money invested in wood materials).
Building A Garden Box:
Eventually, I scraped together enough wood to start a project. I took my recycled pieces of old wood, limited to no skills, some leftover screws and nails collected over the years, a hammer, a hack saw, and a power drill. Imagine dumping all of this into a pile and saying, "O.K. this is all I have. I can't build a house or a deck, but maybe something." My daughter asked me to buy her a garden box to put on our back deck so she could grow some vegetables in it: perfect project. I made a crappy little box with legs and a bottom that could fit her purpose.
I didn't follow any plan. It required me to think, tinker, make some mistakes, and fix them. It reminded me to be comfortable with being uncomfortable because with limited resources I couldn't have great expectations. It turned out more successful than I'd hoped. I'm not certain there is a square angle in the thing anywhere, but it works. It was a small win: enough to learn and enough to motivate me toward progression.
Building A New Desk:
I wanted a new desk for my PC and electronics projects. I had my own biases and basically wanted a really heavy sturdy table that was longer than traditional desks. I wanted to build the slab portion myself, but I did not have a lot of clamps or a planer, and I didn't have any high-end sanding tools. However, I didn't want to just buy a desk because I felt I'd overpay, and the product wouldn't be exactly what I wanted. I bought a nice slab of butcher block from my local home improvement store, I bought some nice steel legs from Amazon. I bought some wood fasteners and bolts online. The project:
Sand the butcher block and learn about different grits of sandpaper.
Learn about countersinking holes and using wood glue and metal inserts. Practice making angles as square as possible.
From scrap wood, design and make a small box to hold all PC cables and power strips. Attach this to the table.
Find my local woodcraft store and learn about stains and sealants.
Make some mistakes, but try to limit them: practice drilling, gluing, and sanding on scrap wood before working on the slab.
Again, the project turned out much better than I'd hoped. My work allowed me to focus on learning some of the other soft skills around its construction.
Repairing the couch:
This was a step up. The couch frame had broken. The springs were bent out of shape. The couch was a nice-looking couch but the inner frame design looked like it had been made as cheaply as possible. So right from the start the couch was already headed for the scrap heap. Any progress at making it usable was a win. It didn’t have to be perfect, but any fix was better than buying a new couch.
I tore out the bottom portion of the frame that contained the springs. I spent thirty bucks on some 2x4 lumber and built a frame that I thought would fill the gap I'd ripped out of the couch. I had to think about the weight that the frame would have to support, and how to limit the amount of wood and money I'd spend to make it work. (I wanted to keep my resources as low as possible). I recalled from my garden box project that when requiring strong support for a considerable weight, the leg supports should not be directly screwed into the frame from the sides. Doing so places excessive stress solely on the screws, rather than distributing the load evenly across the wood of the leg itself. I'd seen half-lap joints on youtube and thought about making something similar. So for the legs, I cut out a portion of the width so that the frame could rest on the support of the wooden legs from underneath the frame rather than from the sides. It wasn't pretty, but it let me think and practice, make some mistakes, and learn to use my speed square better. It worked. It turned out much better than I'd thought.
Sharing this is somewhat embarrassing because it is extremely remedial woodworking. However, that is the point: being comfortable with being uncomfortable and not letting other people’s opinions be a hindrance to making mistakes. I want to not care about being embarrassed in learning to do something. The product might be remedial, but the skills are scalable, the motivation for improvement is positive, and the expenses are small.
Takeaways:
I mention woodworking here because I’m a complete noob on the subject, but I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned from the past.
A long time ago, the lab where I work had an instrument that spat out data but didn't have any reporting software that created test reports. I googled a few youtube videos on the v-lookup function in Microsoft Excel. It only required my time. We had no reporting software. Failure was the default. Any tool to make some kind of report from the data was a success no matter how ugly the reports looked. I figured out a working solution. It was ugly, but it worked. It required few resources, no money, and the freedom to try without fear of failure. From this, I learned how to scale what I learned. I write applications using visual basic and pivot tables and automated data management processes all the time now. This was only because expectations were always low, resources were limited, and I was free to experiment. It scaled quickly. It taught me not to be intimidated about learning to code. This encouraged me to grow.
I took a course in Python programming from Udemy.com for ten bucks. It required only my time, a normal pc, and the software was free. After a while something stuck. I learned I could drastically improve how to analyze large amounts of data and automate many of the processes my lab used to make our jobs more efficient and easier. I screwed up my programs hundreds of times working out solutions, but there were no spent resources other than my ten bucks and my time. I took a few more courses from Udemy on the subject. Again, it was scalable because my expectations were always low, the courses were cheap, my resources were limited, and I had the freedom to fail and experiment.
I could give a few examples of the wrong kind of failure though. The times I bought expensive cameras because I was interested in photography often left me crushed. The expensive camera depreciated quickly inversely proportional to my photography skills. I thought I could fix this again by upgrading. I only upgraded my mistake. It turns out that technology changes quickly but physics doesn't. Lenses involve glass focusing light. Camera technology doesn’t change what light and lenses do. A single cheap wide aperture lens, a cheap light reflector, and a cheap consumer camera would have been a much better kit. It would have cost me less and the lenses would last forever regardless of the camera. The quality of the images I captured would have been relatively the same and it would have given me limited resources with lesser expectations. Then I could have only upgraded the camera when the cost was low and my skill level warranted it.
I could go on and on with my screw-ups, but the point is that there is the right kind of failure and the wrong kind of failure.
If the expectation is perfection, then failure under such conditions is soul-sucking. If on the other hand, failure is the default expectation, and you are free to experiment, then any attempt, no matter how small, is a boon.