This reminds me of a passage from "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" that I love to quote:
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Just make yourself perfect and then paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
That was a great quote. I guess no matter how much you know about the latest and greatest paradigms involved in the art of software. You can never truly become "perfect" if it does not become a part of yourself. And to extend that you can never truly become "perfect" if your description of software is not art, but work. When I think about it, it only shows how far I have to go to reach that kind of Zen like state.
The underlying assumption to the post is that somewhere deep within the turd being polished there is a nugget of gold.
Not every turd is hiding a nugget of gold. And not every polisher of turds has the capacity or understanding to find the nugget.
The other saying that comes to mind is:
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the
ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.
The underlying assumption to the post is that somewhere deep within the turd being polished there is a nugget of gold.
It's not that so much as that in the process of polishing the turd, it's possible for you to realize you're working on a turd and start over again. That's part of the revision process.
One case that stands out to me was that in the writing of my novel, I had a 70-page part that I thought was great and slaved away on, then realized in one blinding moment that it was awful. I threw it away, rewrote the entire section over a day, and now it's the best part of the book. (I'll say in advance that the book wasn't exactly a nugget of gold, but at least I was aware of that when I published it. If I'd spent more time in it it could have become much better.)
I don't doubt that making something awesome is about removing the unawesome parts. But what most people are missing is the sense of what is unawesome and what is awesome. This trait of having excellent taste is what most are missing... at least from my experience of interacting with others.
The people who are really good at something have an evolved sense of what they are willing to accept. For example, I knew of a guy named Rod Weckworth who was/is really good with relationships. And I think he was really successful because he had a sense of what level of a connection he was willing to accept with people. He wasn't okay with having an okay relationship with people. He makes sure to write thank you notes, call on birthdays, etc.
So more than just not letting shit stay, you have to have a nose for detecting shit.
Yeah! On IRC somebody read this and disagreed with me: something to the effect of "I've seen amateurs revise and they still churn out shit."
But you can't just sit down and revise something. You've got to develop the ability to be self-critical, and that means learning what to be self-critical of. So in my case of an amateur writing a symphony, he'd have to be willing to learn just what makes symphonies suck, and if he's not willing to do that, chances are he won't be so successful after all.
"In the same way I fancied that those nations which, starting from a semi-barbarous state and advancing to
civilization by slow degrees, have had their laws successively determined, and, as it were, forced upon them
simply by experience of the hurtfulness of particular crimes and disputes, would by this process come to be
possessed of less perfect institutions"
- Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
I think that Descartes' thrust here is that building anything up slowly will introduce artifacts that have nothing to do with the optimal solution.
Sometimes the only way to truly succeed is to come up with a truly amazing starting point. If you try to build off a bad idea, you will often get nowhere.
From the article: "It baffles me that people think making...worldshocking pieces of work is a particular challenge. It’s mainly a battle of endurance."
I don't disagree with you here, but I think you are vastly underestimating the backbreaking effort in that single word: endurance. Try telling a marathoner that just hit the wall at mile 22 that all they need is a little more endurance.
"Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
I was struck, on reading your post, the similarities between your premise and the premise of "Intelligent Design" advocates. To paraphrase both you and they, "How can something so perfect have occurred iteratively?"
I admit there is some similarity there, and it might be because I didn't fully explain myself, but I would argue that it's neither a perfect conception nor iterative development that creates true greatness, but repetitive rebirth. When you simply build on the past, you aren't considering its true intentions. How many laws are there in the US that are simply reactions to British rule (i.e. safety from the quartering of troops)? Should those laws be held in as high esteem as those laws that are truly based on human rights? Descartes continues in Discourse on Method:
As for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could not do better than
resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either other
more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of reason. I firmly believed
that in this way I should much better succeed in the conduct of my life, than if I built only upon old
foundations, and leaned upon principles which, in my youth, I had taken upon trust.
"The longer you try and deshit something, the less shit it is."
Not true for the 20%, but true for the 80%. Software is a good example : all 1.0 versions are crap. The trick is to get to the next n revisions and still be interested in the project. You may end up with none of the original code, but it's the act of revision and correction that makes it better.
All those who say you can't polish a turd, I say look at Windows. From version 1 to version 7, there's a gloss in the side of that nugget that you would not have believed possible 20 years ago.
Someone said it best, I can't remember who it was: "It's like knowing a fabulous sculpture is hidden inside a block of marble, and all you have to do is remove the marble that isn't part of it. It's an encouraging thought, because it reminds you there is an answer, but it's not much use in practice because the search space is too big."
I'll explain something about this blog, because it's not something that I wrote specifically on the page and so it's not seen by a lot of the people that haven't been reading this daily.
I don't use this blog like other people use blogs. I essentially write down every thought that comes to me, without planning it out or revising it. So there's a ramble about Valve on the front page right now, and not a particularly interesting one, and I'm aware of the fact that it's not interesting. I'm fine with that, because my blog isn't a marketing tool. It's simply a place where I store my thoughts.
So this post was conceived of pretty much instantaneously, written in 5 minutes, and posted without a double check. I didn't even bother to go back and look at the spelling.
It's all about intent. My blog is not a masterpiece in any sense other than the fact that I attempt not to filter myself in any way. But at the same time, this post was interesting enough to provoke a nice little discussion, and it was interesting enough for somebody to think it merited posting.
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Just make yourself perfect and then paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.