Harold Edgerton: Death of a Light Bulb (1936, printed later)

" … the crutial resource I need to deploy to succeed."

I learned early in my consulting career that my most successful clients started their projects with the worst ideas. These often seemed initially inspiring but ultimately unrealistic, and rarely survived into implementation. The less successful operations married their earliest notions and spent the bulk of their development efforts trying to avoid divorce. They would end up implementing something nobody really needed to satisfy some urge that hadn't survived the earliest phases. The most successful companies seemed to be most skilled at skewering their originating BrightIdeas!

I later realized that all development efforts start with BrightIdeas! They typically seem attractive, often seductive, and easily gain requisite support. On their surface, they usually seem eminently doable. Only after completing some initial scrutiny does their inevitably poisonous nature start to become obvious. What the team chartered to achieve an ultimately unachievable objective does in response defines their success. Those who buckle under and struggle harder rarely produce much of value. It might even be true to say that if the process of developing something isn't satisfying, neither will the result prove satisfying. The quality of the developers' experience tends to be curiously defining, so attending to that one rather obvious element can contribute much to the success of any finished product. Death marches never produce satisfying products.

It also seems true that each effort starts anew. It does not seem to matter how many successful or failed products the team has previously produced; they start their next effort with BrightIdeas!, which will inevitably prove somewhat less than brilliant in practice. This fact might serve as a reason to justify cynicism, but that reaction misses a more significant point. Beginnings always feature innocence. Nobody's ever crossed previously untrodden routes, and each fresh initiative unavoidably must cross previously uncrossed territory. Therefore, the best anyone can produce at first features what will only later seem like the obvious toolmarks of ignorance. At the moment of conception, they inevitably seem like brilliant innovation. Only experience can demonstrate the difference.

Experience appears as disappointment. Those most capable of tolerating disappointment seem to fare better in surviving the inevitable struggle between ignorance and growing experience. You will come to know better. If this experience makes you feel worse about yourself, so much the worse. As the old homily insists: Get Used To Disappointment. It will most certainly be your nearly constant companion if you seek innovation. Nobody gets it right on the first pass. Few do much better by their tenth. The curious notion of continuous improvement amounts to continuous disappointment in practice. If this prospect renders you cynical, so much the worse for you, for cynicism has never successfully vanquished disappointment. It only encourages one to flinch as they release their arrows.

New Beginnings have surrounded me in recent weeks. People starting political campaigns. My beginning a fresh chapter in my writing experience. I'm of an age now where I can successfully predict that much of whatever made some initiative initially most attractive will very likely disqualify itself before the finish line appears. What seemed as though it should have been easy might well prove to be grueling or impossible to achieve. What I believed might prove to be impossible might have manifested without much exertion. This universe works in these mysterious ways. It works, after a fashion. Entropy insists that all BrightIdeas! be brought at least to their knees before their project succeeds. Each will, in turn, prove to be another dedication test, serving up disappointment. I am reminded that my ability to forgive myself and others for the BrightIdeas! we inflict upon ourselves and each other might be the crutial resource I need to succeed.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz