Make a List

I recently attended a wedding where the bride mentioned in her vows some advice she'd received. Years earlier, having apparently kissed her share of frogs, she was advised by a friend told her to take some time to write a list of all the qualities she wanted in a husband. A few months later she met her groom, who had all the qualities on that list (there were over 100).

It was my wife who gave her that advice. The key is that the best place to start, when trying to do something difficult, especially if it's new to you, is to become clear about what you're trying to do. Make a list.

In engineering, this list would probably look like a spec table, or a datasheet, or a requirements document.

List out all the properties you want. Yes, even the obvious ones. Be specific. Don't worry too much about precision. It's ok for it to be partly aspirational, but do make the effort to understand which items would be easier to attain and which might be harder.

The second part of my wife's advice, after making the list, was to lose it. That seems silly, right? You just spent this effort to make it, now you want to lose it?

In fact you didn't put a huge amount of effort into it. What you really want to avoid is becoming a slave to the list. The value of this initial list is as a clarifying exercise. It's to get all the silent assumptions and everything else out and in writing so you can see it there, all together. Now that it's out of your brain you're free to get down to work. You'll be better able to recognize and focus on what's actually going to be important/constructive toward accomplishing your goal, and much better able to recognize and skip over unimportant or unpromising pathways.

My wife did mention, however, that you should lose the list in such a way that you'll one day run across it again. This is an important part - once you've forgotten the list's specifics, and made some real-life progress on your problem, it can be quite clarifying once again to see what you once wrote. Hopefully you'll see how far you've come, if not having achieved the goal, then at least having grown your knowledge and maturity. At worst, it will be a sobering experience that gets you back on track and off of any tangents, or that shows you how much work still remains.

The fuzzier or less well-defined your idea is, or the more anxiety you have about accomplishing it, the more valuable this exercise is, especially the part where you lose the list. And even if you feel your idea is reasonably well defined, still go ahead and write the list. If you're right then the list will be a breeze, and you still might learn something from the exercise. If not, then you really have learned something.