Challenge Your Perspective

Sometime in September I was battling with myself over whether it was worth my time to continue putting in 15-20 hours per week on this project.  I had cut back on my consulting work and was taking a double-hit in the wallet since I was making less money and also dropping some savings on the development effort.  I was spending most of my time going over and over some technical details of the mechanisms I had convinced myself were required to make the invention work.  Each one added weight, complexity and cost to the total package.  Normally accustomed to doing my design work on a CAD program, I had resorted to paper when my ideas were changing faster than my ability to click the erase tool.  With a 2-year-old in the house, any and all loose paper tends to get scribbled on.  After a few close encounters with the crayons, I took my work to the local Panera Bread restaurant where I could work in relative peace .  I dove deeply into the technical details and felt like I was making real progress.  At least, I was making more than the usual number of drawings for the time that I had been working.  Anyway, I was starting to feel pretty good about it all when I heard a hushed giggle from a nearby table.  As I turned to look in that direction, another hushed voice scolded "Don't stare!"  There was a table with five college students who had been watching me.  When I looked back at my paper I realized that my pencil drawings were nearly invisible next to the bright crayon scribbles that dominated nearly every piece of paper in front of me.  With egg on my face, I casually slipped the paper into my bag and pulled out the laptop.

As embarrassing as that was, there was a useful lesson in it.  In focusing on the details, I had simply blocked out the larger picture which any casual observer around me could not help but notice.  The same was true of my overall design.  When I stepped away from the details and change my perspective, I was able to see some fundamental changes that dramatically simplified the device and made many of those little details unimportant.