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Begin with no Guarantee May 11, 2006

I’m a fan of animae.

One of my all time favourites is Ghost in the Shell.

I was watching an interview with the director Mamouru Oshii talking about his work on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. He was asked a question along the lines of: What is this movie about?

He answers in a way fitting of the movie. Saying (and I’ll miss quote this till I find a proper transcript) “You don’t know what it’s about when you start. It takes two to three years to produce a movie like this. If you know what it’s about at the start, there is no use in making it.”

This attitude is what I have been attempting to foster whenever I start a new project. Begin with the end in mind, but do not expect a guarantee that you’ll reach that end, let alone you’ll get there the way you plan. Keep the end in mind, and stay fluid in your thinking. Keep the end in mind, and keep learning new ways to get there (or not).

When I give myself a project, or a client a task, or a student some homework, the outcome is usually secondary to the process involved in getting that outcome. I have seen many people refuse to start a project, or perform a task, or ignore the homework all because they don’t know how it’s going to turn out, or they don’t have enough knowledge or confidence to get success. When you start learning something new, success is not the entire reason you start - if you are guaranteed success, would you even bother starting to learn it? You must do the drills to get the skills, even if the drills seem like a waste of time.

Sir Richard Branson is a good model for this. When he started Virgin Records, he had no idea how it would turn out and didn’t have the skills required to pull it off. Then he did the same thing again with Virgin airlines. And again any time he got into a balloon.

Of course, doing this requires a few skills in itself; Suppression of ego (so you can ask the ’stupid’ questions, be wrong and make mistakes) and suspension of prior beliefs (so you can actually learn something new, rather than attempting to fit your prior understanding into the current situation).

So what drills did you do today to improve your skills for tomorrow?

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