Welcome to Words with Wynn! If this is your first time perusing my content and you’d like more of my weekly musings, subscribe below:
There’s a great Q&A with legendary youtuber Casey Neistat where he’s asked “How do you always have a brilliant idea for your videos?” to which he responds:
“I don’t always have a brilliant idea. If you were to reduce any one of my movies down to a single idea, you would find a perfectly mediocre idea. It’s the execution that matters, never the idea.”
It’s a simple concept, but one often overlooked: Execution is all that matters. I find that highly goal-oriented people can fall into the trap of thinking their way into feeling productive, but failing to tangibly act in a way that moves their goals forward. This can be a form of the Illusion of Truth.
I’m especially prone to this. Those of you that have followed the Words with Wynn journey have been exposed to my maniacal goal-setting systems. They’re effective for plotting my course, but scheming is only useful to the extent that it results in action. That’s precisely why I put so much emphasis on atomizing ideas down to their unit of minimum viable progress and highlighting the more tactical tools in the mix (daily accountability, monthly assessments). It helps to keep me honest:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynman
Thinking about and strategizing your path are valuable, of course. But it’s only through action and iteration that we can really get feedback on our ideas. This is sage wisdom in the startup world with regard to products, but it extends beyond companies. Engaging in our work, creatively or otherwise, provides an outlet for our ideas to wrestle with reality. The interplay between these two things is what helps us to iterate and refine our passions.
Iterating to Success
In life, it’s equally important to recognize what you don’t want as what you do, and more often than not the dislikes can only be gleaned through experience. Trial and error sharpens our ideas and clarifies our desires. People are often told to “chase your passion” without the corresponding encouragement to try as many things as possible in order to even identify a passion. The importance of relentlessly iterating on our vision for ourselves is utterly undersold in advising young people today, and it’s fundamentally important.
This is a tough reality to bear in mind. Internalizing the understanding that it will take a variety of experiences to whittle down to those that most interest you is tough. Patience is a challenging virtue. When asked about his missteps in inventing the lightbulb, Edison responded “I have not failed 10,000 times—I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” The key is that your detours and failings serve as springboards in identifying the proper path forward.
With that in mind, the Wright Brothers provide a great historical example that outlines the supreme importance of a bias toward action.
The Wright Brothers
How did a pair of uneducated bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, come to outcompete the world’s brightest minds in accomplishing one of mankind’s greatest achievements? Theirs is a story of insatiable curiosity and relentless persistence.
From a young age, Wilbur and Orville Wright both possessed mechanical aptitude as well as an entrepreneurial bent. Their first business was actually a printing operation started by the eldest Wright brother, Reuchlin Wright, in which the two younger brothers quickly came aboard. They saw some amount of success, and this operation lent itself to their mechanical aptitudes, with the two younger brothers designing and building a more efficient printer for the business. Soon thereafter, a bicycling craze began to spread across America with the popularization of the safety bicycle (think today’s bicycles vs. the penny farthings with the massive front wheel). Spying an opportunity, the two brothers went to work establishing a profitable bicycle shop. This work was pivotal in honing their engineering abilities. It helped to feed their insatiable curiosity, as experimentation with bicycles was at its peak. Their tinkering around the shop inspired many of their ideas about flight including the concept of stability through movement and fluid steering adjustments. Additionally, the bicycle operation helped to finance their kookie flying machines.
In the late 1800’s, the question of flight was becoming all the rage. Soaring through the skies in a man-made flying machine is an inexorably complex engineering and mechanical problem, and many of the era’s greatest inventors, from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison, had played with various ideas for flight. Some were more akin to helicopters that would leverage upward rotors to lift the pilot skyward, while others thought that a flying machine for air would need to structurally mirror a boat through water in order to achieve requisite aeronautical stability. In the latter camp resided the Wrights’ primary competitor, Samuel Pierpont Langley.
Ever the contrarians, the Wrights’ came to believe that the flying process would put the impetus on the pilot to navigate second-by-second changes in air pressure, wind, and other flight conditions. Inspired by a combination of studying nature and toying with their own designs, the Wrights leaned toward a more flexible model, both in the autonomy they gave the pilot as well as the physical flexibility of the wings themselves (a design mimicking birds). This idea was diametrically opposed to models like Langley’s that prioritized rigid stability in flight, which required clunkier planes counterbalanced by more powerful (and heavier) propulsion.
Inherent to this David and Goliath tale was the relentless iteration on the part of the Wrights:
Scrappy and agile, the Wright Brothers’ bias toward action led them to ship prototype after prototype, tossing each into the air and refining the kinks after it crashed to the ground. The pair was under resourced and outmanned, yet were able to accomplish an incredible breakthrough thanks to sheer grit.
An aside: For financial context, Langley was the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and received a $50,000 grant from the War Department as well as a $5,000 donation from Alexander Graham Bell (among other private backers) vs. the self-funded Wright Brothers whose estimated costs on early experiments amounted to about $1,000. So much with so little.
Two more subtle, but equally notable, concepts from their success: the importance of locale and advantage of hands-on engineering. With the former, the selection of Kitty Hawk was a key component that enabled their iterative approach. The location had soft sands and consistent winds, thus making it ideal for prototyping (building wind tunnels to test aerodynamics) as well as crashing quickly and relatively safely. With the latter, their ‘in the trenches’ approach of building, tweaking, and flying their machines themselves gave the Wright Brothers’ an intimate understanding of the gliders that would have been impossible to gather through blackboard theoretics or outsourced manufacturing.
These three ideas can be directly integrated into our own lives. In achieving their greatest heights, the Wright Brothers failed time and again. This repeated practice is precisely how they figured out what would work, and how they could win. Failing in an environment that allowed for safe and rapid iteration was a key element of their success, and one we should all consider more closely. By ‘dogfooding’ their own ideas, piloting the machines themselves and adjusting the gliders with their own two hands, Wilbur and Orville were able to develop an intimate understanding of their craft in a way that few of their competitors could replicate.
Collectively, they learned by doing. Progress requires failures, and only through our shortcomings can we steadily improve. Iterating to success requires just that- iteration.
There Are No Alibis
"I happen to be in a very tough business where there are no alibis. It is good or it is bad and the thousand reasons that interfere with a book being as good as possible are no excuses if it is not. You have to make it good and a man is a fool if he adds or takes hindrance after hindrance after hindrance to being a writer when that is what he cares about. Taking refuge in domestic successes, being good to your broke friends etc. is merely a form of quitting." - Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters
There are no alibis in the annals of history. This is the complement to Casey’s mantra on execution. Everybody wants to be someone, accomplish something, but incredibly few are willing to put in the relentless iterations that greatness requires. Ideators outnumber executors, and the only way to test your theories is through obdurate persistence.
More humorously:
“This is what it takes to be #1, baby. Ain’t nobody gonna give you nothin’. Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy ass weight.” - Ronnie Coleman, 8x Mr. Olympia Winner
It’s funnier to hear it uttered by the legend himself, but that quote lives rent free in my head.
Simply, ideas are plentiful, but follow-through is rare. Cultivating a bias toward action is a self-sustaining advantage.
Ship more, ideate less.
- W