Bradley Brownell’s post yesterday about EV conversions has really got me thinking... and not just about stuffing one of those EV conversions into an old Plymouth Fury. The comments also got me thinking about how advancements are made, and why they’re sometimes not.
Many years ago, I worked for a guy named Reuven. Reuven was an Israeli-born immigrant, sharp as a tack, full of energy and ideas. He spoke four languages, was a gifted engineer, and he was also a talented salesman with a flair for the dramatic; he was one of those people who could show you a sketch and then paint the picture in your mind of how it was going to be once he figured out the kinks.
(My great-grandfather, Joseph Tucker, was similarly-minded; he devised and orchestrated one of the most successful home-front projects of World War II: the Harvest Brigade.)
My job with Reuven involved figuring out the kinks. We fell into an unofficial working relationship that kind of worked like this: he’d come up with an idea, I’d try to come up with reasons why it wouldn’t work, and if I couldn’t then we’d try the idea. (And more than once, we’d try the idea anyway, and I’d be proven wrong.) Reuven was always coming up with a new way to do something, a new approach, something better, faster, more efficient. He was a “how-to” guy, and I ended up in the role of “why-not” guy. It was frustrating at times, head-butting over something he just knew would work, while I saw only the roadblocks involved.
And in the comments on the EV article, I saw those two camps emerge: how to make it work, and why it never would. Those who could envision all sorts of car being adapted to electric power, and those who pointed out the minutiae of every drawback: weight, placement, complexity, cost.
It has been my experience that success requires both mindsets working together. If you don’t have a “how-to” person, you never advance anything, because nothing ever changes. But if you don’t have a “why-not” person, then nothing ever gets done, because they keep the “how-to” people on task, and whittle their grand ideas down to something that actually works.
And, remarkably, since that time, I have changed camps, and now come down on the “how-to” side more often than not, especially when it comes to environmental issues. And I can see the other side more clearly now because of it. Too often, the “why-nots” shoot down an idea because it isn’t a panacea; if you can’t solve the whole problem, why bother with the idea at all? But the technical challenges of our environmental woes aren’t going to be solved by a panacea. They’re going to be solved by making one thing a little better, then another, then another. It’s not going to be one giant “how-to” idea; it’s going to be thousands, tens of thousands, each one solving a small part of the problem. But if those little ideas keep getting shot down because they don’t go far enough, we’ll never get anywhere at all.
Reuven is gone, victim of a stupid senseless act of violence long after I left. But I’m grateful for the five years I spent working for him, because watching a “how-to” person in action taught me a lot.
Be a “why-not” if you want; sometimes ideas need to be stopped before they take up too much time or effort. But don’t immediately dismiss every idea coming from the “how-to” side. Some of those ideas area going to change the world; we just need to figure out which ones.