MIH SWAT

I am sure we have all heard the old chestnut “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” (Thomas Edison) and while it might be tired that does not mean it is any less relevant, particularly today, with everybody chasing that elusive startup success. Calls to ‘think outside the box’ are all very well but the groundwork still needs to be done. I believe that not all craftsmen are artists but all great artists are craftsmen first and foremost. As part of honing my craft I come across some ideas which I feel are both fresh and relevant. I thought I would share one. This goes to the idea that research helps build the platform on which genius can occur. Something that web workers would do well to note due to both the relative isolation in which they work and the intensity of their involvement in the medium in which they work.

Paul Krugman recently won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, announced on Monday in fact (October 15th 2008).  In a previously published essay on how he works he discusses his four basic rules for research.  These are brief snippets meant as teasers for the essay which should be recommended reading, just adapt them for your context.

1. Listen to the Gentiles
2. Question the question
3. Dare to be silly
4. Simplify, simplify

Listen to the Gentiles

“What I mean by this rule is “Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language.” Something we hear often but still manage to forget. The audience or client is not a ‘web obsessed’ geek and they do not spend the kind of hours online that we do. For them the web is a tool or toy that must fit in to their lives not the other way around. If we are to create applications and services they use we have to listen to what they are saying. We have to go out of our way to listen to and understand their wants and needs, their requirements.

Question the question

“In general, if people in a field have bogged down on questions that seem very hard, it is a good idea to ask whether they are really working on the right questions. Often some other question is not only easier to answer but actually more interesting!” This gets to the kernel of what I am interested in here. Is the work I am doing addressing the cause, or merely a symptom of what I am trying to achieve ? Am I stepping back, listening to what my work is saying ? Am I asking the right questions of it ?

Dare to be silly

“What I believe is that the age of creative silliness is not past. Virtue, as an economic theorist, does not consist in squeezing the last drop of blood out of assumptions that have come to seem natural because they have been used in a few hundred earlier papers. If a new set of assumptions seems to yield a valuable set of insights, then never mind if they seem strange.” Could also be ‘Dare to be different’, just because thats the way things are done is not going to get you anywhere one has to be prepared to take the chance, make the big leap.

Simplify, simplify

“The injunction to dare to be silly is not a license to be undisciplined. ”
“The strategy is: always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model. The act of stripping down to this minimalist model will force you to get to the essence of what you are trying to say (and will also make obvious to you those situations in which you actually have nothing to say). And this minimalist model will then be easy to explain to other economists as well. ” ‘KISS’ need I say more?