It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
- Rollo May
Mini-story #1:
In my early 20's I pretty much did 2 things. Ride motorcycles and code. Oh, and given my motorcycles were always sort of junky and I beat the snot out of them, I spent plenty of time fixing motorcycles too - I guess that's 3 things then. (If you think I forgot dating or went to bars or some such - nope. We're good. 3 things).
Every now and then we needed an "old man" (like in his 40's or something) to help us fix something when it was beyond our self-taught abilities. Now when I say "old man" here and throughout this article, I don't necessarily mean "old" (and I don't necessarily mean "man") - I mean "experienced". Experienced at whatever I'm interested in at the time - or more specifically, experienced at what I wasn't experienced in at the time.
And as far as fixing motorcycles, what struck me was the way he'd go about it.
A rather common case would be something like there being one final screw holding on some engine part that we needed to replace, but it was buried deep inside the engine - i.e. you could barely see it. My first reaction was to wedge a screwdriver in there as far as I could - and see if, with luck, brute force, and karma, I could turn it enough to get it out.
The old guy on the other hand never went this route. He merely looked at it a moment, then immediately started taking off the neighboring easy-to-remove piece of the engine. Once that was off, he then effortlessly put his screwdriver in to remove the now exposed screw. Now mind you, the old-guy's way was my back-up plan - but I was betting that my brash exuberance would payoff in a slightly quicker result. Sometimes it did - sometimes it didn't - and sometimes I broke screwdrivers.
This trade-off of investment up-front versus brute-force hope became so obvious that my friends and I used it as vernacular. "Do you want to try this the 'young man' way or the 'old man' way?". It was surprising how without any further explanation we would know all the precise steps involved in both for whatever situation.
...
Your real business model might be hiding like that last screw holding on part of the engine. Despite you stubbornly breaking screwdrivers, you might not get to what you need. It might just be worth asking yourself, "WWTOMD" - What would the old man do?
- Paul Tyma, The Young Man's Business Model
