Incremental Gains

A couple weeks ago, I listened to a podcast by Freakonomics Radio called "In Praise of Incrementalism." The podcast argues that progress often takes the form of small, incremental gains. It described how federal approval of gay marriage may have looked like an overnight success for the LGBT community when in fact it came after decades of work by gay rights activists to push society to a point where this kind of success could occur. Gay rights activists have been working in the US since the 1950's to make gains for the LGBT community - they've fought against calling homosexuality a disease, or a criminal act. Then they fought to end legalized discrimination against the LGBT community. Each milestone took years of lobbying, court cases and effort on the part of the activists to achieve. The podcast makes the same point using a couple of other examples, but each time the message is the same - progress often comes in the form of many small, incremental changes.

This concept has totally changed my approach to work and life over the past couple of weeks.

At school, at work and in my personal projects, my biggest challenge has always been getting started. In big project classes I always spent too much time designing and preparing to build than actually building. In writing essays I always wanted to do more research, but I never wanted to write the paper. On my personal projects, I always wanted to do these big, cool builds but I never felt like I had the time to do them. I was always afraid to build, to get my hands dirty, to start the task because I was afraid of failing. I always felt as though I had one chance to get something right and if I screwed up, my failure would be out for the whole world to see and it would take an insurmountable amount of work to fix my mistakes. I have desperately admired and envied fellow students and coworkers who had these beautiful things they had so carefully engineered, because I had no success like that that I could point to. I believed that they had built these beautiful things because they were smarter than me - they had seen the obstacles and planned for them ahead of time, they had done exhaustive research answering all their questions, they already possessed all the skills they needed to be successful.

But none of that was true. The beautiful things my friends and colleagues had made were the result of hours of making. The people I was envious of had done what I couldn't do - they'd gone into the lab and started to build. They overcame their fears, went into the lab, tried something, learned from it, and tried again. Of course, when they presented their completed builds, they didn't tell the story of how it came to be as a series of failures - they spoke of the lessons they learned and the questions they answered along the way. I had never learned these lessons because I'd never even gotten started.

I am trying to apply that lesson now and it has made all the difference in the world. At first, I was disheartened last November when I found that, despite having an engineering degree, I couldn't make a nice aluminum pen. But now, even though I've been working on it for 2 months, I realize that I am getting better with every build and there is no other way for me to learn how to make a good pen. I had intended to make a CAD model of the pen I wanted to machine, but I decided not to - I didn't want to use the CAD as a crutch, as a distraction from throwing metal on the lathe and asking: how can I make this better?

I've tried to apply this lesson at work too. I've learned to approach each new challenge like I'm starting a new video game. I try to pay attention to all the details, because I don't know yet which variables are going to be the most important ones. Whenever I see something happen that I don't understand, I try to investigate it a little further - maybe it's a clue to how I could better achieve my objective. Then I start to play around - what are the rules of the game? Can I do this? What about this? If this phenomenon is dependent on this variable, what happens when I adjust it? Does that help me? The process of focused playing in the lab is becoming more exciting and enabling to me, and less frightening. I'm trying to jump in and try things that I used to spend weeks feeling trepidation about doing. I'm starting to understand that in order to do something well, I'm definitely going to have to do it multiple times so I might as well get started now. There is simply no other way to get something done right than to try many, many times.