Many years ago, in grad school, I had an exceptional thesis advisor named Alan Chochinov. In the years since then, he’s become reasonably well known within design circles as an advocate for responsible design and design ethics. He also started a major at the School of Visual Arts called Products of Design. But in 2003 he was mostly just a really good teacher and a really good thesis advisor. And (full disclosure) a couple years later I ended up going to work for him as a writer and editor at Core77.
But one thing that he did every year in his thesis class on the very first week that we met was he would assign all of the students to finish their thesis the following week.
To a certain degree, he was serious about this. He basically said: If you can bring in a finished product of some sort that demonstrates a successful completion of your thesis, I will mark it and you can spend the entire rest of the term—in fact, the rest of the year—doing basically whatever you want. And apparently there was one guy many years ago who actually did this (he actually showed up in the comments when I posted this on linked in—his name is José Alcala, and he’s a wonderful designer and a lovely human being).
But the rest of us just scrambled and did whatever we could and sort of admitted defeat. And then we would all have a conversation about it.
Now, the idea behind this—which I have come to realize is kind of genius—is that it establishes a bias for action. We're here to do things, not just talk about things, because this is design school. It’s much better to act on the ideas that you have and see where they go than it is to just continue thinking about them and refining.
Because the thing is, whether you're starting a thesis project, or you're writing a book, or you're founding a startup, you're always going into it with a bunch of ideas about what might work. And the tendency is always to think through those ideas over and over until you have the right idea. And then you go and you execute them.
But of course, that's never how it works, and one of the main things they teach you in design school is that you're never going to think your way to a successful solution. Not exclusively anyway. You always have to make something. You always have to try things out. You always have to experiment.
So this “finish your thesis the next week” approach was essentially a way of getting us to take all the ideas bouncing around in our heads and give them some kind of form. That could be to write something—we did have to actually write a hundred page-ish report as part of our thesis project—but we also had to create a presentation or a prototype…some kind of artifact.
And in the process of doing this, you learn all sorts of new things that you would not have stumbled across otherwise. You recognize very quickly that some of these ideas that seemed great in theory are in fact completely unworkable. You also frequently stumble upon an alternate way of doing something, or realize that the opposite of something you were trying to do actually turns out to be better. This is one of the reasons why designers like to say “making is a way of thinking.”
Well, I'm not a designer anymore. I used to be. But I still take this approach in my writing, whether I'm working on a book, developing a content strategy, or writing a white paper. I try to force myself to make a “finished” version of something as quickly as possible, knowing that I'm probably going to throw it out. Because the amount of information I'm going to gain, and the insight I'm going to develop doing that is going to shape the entire rest of the project and make it go faster and get to a better outcome.
So this is sort of the content version of an MVP. Or if you're an author, it's the version of doing a crappy first draft. And it reminds me of something another great teacher that I had once said: my high school English teacher in AP English. She used to say, “There is no good writing, only good rewriting.”
So the best step to getting your writing done? Finish it now.
