Tightening the Loop

Entry question: How does Rapid Prototyping work?

Introduction

We saw in Iterate that Paul Graham writes his essays by Rapid Prototyping. You come up with a minimal working version 1 as soon as possible and then start refining it.

In each iteration of the process, you aim to take your essay (program, product, whatever) from one complete version to another by adding some more value.

There is a Loop of Iteration and Feedback and Iteration and Feedback and so on… With each run around the Loop, you add more value to your product.

Why does this work?

At each point, you have a complete product in your hands. You can see the results of your labour right here right now. As per the Motivation Equation, you’re giving yourself both Low Delay (quick feedback) and High Expectancy (you feel more and more confident of success as you keep seeing real results). This gives you tremendous Motivation to keep going.

Cool. That by itself will take us many a mile. Remember, to do something well you have to like it. If the most important source of information is in the implementation of an idea, then the Motivation to keep at it alone will produce massive benefits.

Quality

The above stuff gives you Motivation. But why would Rapidly-Prototyped products (essays, programs, etc.) be of higher quality than normal stuff?

Your product design will be an open question - a hypothesis, if you will - and not a fixed idea that you’re gonna push despite all resistance.

In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowly and meticulously is premature optimization. Better to get a prototype done fast, and see what new ideas it gives you.

– Paul Graham, Made in USA

Rapid Prototyping is a tradeoff between “a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea” or a crude implementation of an awesome idea you discovered in the middle

Tightening the Loop

Most important of all, in my opinion, you will Tighten the Loop with every single iteration. It’s not like you’re doing the same thing in each iteration. You’re changing what you do. That’s what the Feedback part is doing in the Loop.

With experience and information, you start refining your techniques. You now know what does and does not lead to more Impact. You have basically run hundreds of small experiments. You discard crap ideas. You intensify great ideas.

You now start making bigger strides with the same effort. You become more efficient. More and more of your energy is spent moving in the right direction. Earlier, you were all over the place. Now, you’re Tightening your Focus. Your attention is exactly where it needs to be.

Tightening the Loop = Honing in on the Target

It’s not that the time taken per iteration will go down. It is that the amount of value you produce per unit time will go up (like hell). Tightening the Loop means that you are increasingly focussing on the right things.

It also means that you are getting better at doing those things. Getting quick solid feedback and repeating the activity several times are the cornerstones of Deliberate Practice. And by doing all this trial and error, you have hit upon the set of activities that will give you maximum performance - aka you have essentially “designed” activity specifically to improve Performance - another requirement of Deliberate Practice.

Ramp up

As I see it, Rapid Prototyping gives you a high-motivation way to start doing Deliberate Practice. If somebody told you “Hey, here are these high-performance activities. Go do them a hundred times”, there is just no way you will have the Motivation. You will procrastinate like hell, beat yourself up, procrastinate some more, and then give up, saying that you’re just not cut out for it.

Motivation trumps Deliberate Practice anytime. In the sense that even if you have the best designed Deliberate Practice Training Regimen in the world, it is worth nothing if you have no desire to actually go do the stuff. Akrasia is the bottleneck, remember.

And here, Rapid Prototyping is giving us a nice slow ramp up to Deliberate Practice.

Tools of the Trade

Powerful Abstractions and Highly Interactive Environments. Coming soon.

Setting up the Success Spiral

Our aim is to start spinning a large, loose Loop with no concern about what we’re actually doing. “Action is the high bit of success”.

Spin it a lot - do a lot of iterations.

In the Feedback sessions (which should ideally happen right as you’re doing stuff - instant feedback), figure out what worked and what didn’t. Change stuff.

Now you start Tightening the Loop. You start getting better results. All the time, though, you make sure you’re still spinning the Loop, doing lots of iterations, getting lots of pure information.

You keep doing this whole process of rapid refining and ultimately get to a super-tight Loop.

Now, you are essentially landing Direct Hits on your Target. You will be having pure, unadulterated Insights. Massive Productivity.