More Thinking By Doing Needed

A friend one commented that some people think by doing, whilst others do by thinking. By that he meant that some people work through their problems in their head, thinking through all the options and possibilities before acting, whereas other people have to start playing with things in order to map out the problem-space and help them to understand what they think about the problem.

Both approaches have their merits, and I definitely fall into the “doing by thinking” camp. The problem with that method is that sometimes you don’t have enough information to be able to reach any conclusions.

Of late, all the projects I’m involved with seem to be suffering from that problem, but I hadn’t quite put my finger on it until I read Gordon’s post about practising more of what he preaches.

I don’t have any problem practising what I preach, my difficulty is practising things that I’m not confident to preach, and similarly talking about things when I don’t have all the answers (or at least, a lot of the answers). Some of that is because I don’t know enough about the subject (like marketing, or the hardware I’m hoping to finish before geeKyoto 2008), and some of it is because there aren’t any hard and fast answers (marketing again, and the “best” business models for these projects).

So I need to let myself, and encourage myself to, think more by doing. This blog post is a start.