Starting Small

Great piece by Joel Gascoigne: The Habits of Successful People: They Start Small

“The challenge for a lot of us is that when we go about our lives, we interact with so many “big” things and we forget or don’t even know how they originally started. It’s difficult to understand how the evolutionary process of products and brands contributes and is vital to what they are today. We also all have big aspirations and want to get there fast.”

This is an important observation. By the time most of us get to use a product it has already gone through many, many iterations. We never see it in its infancy…we rarely see it before it has achieved momentum and the product team and customers have figured out the true value of it. No, we see it after it has matured and grown up and after all the surfaces have been sanded smooth.

This also reminds me of my favorite law, Gall’s Law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”