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First is a great idea, or at least a fortunate accident, that captures the imagination. To molecular chemists Teflon was a great idea. It was also an accident. Scientists were working on one project involving refrigerants, and discovered that something went wrong with the experiment. The result of the experiment gone awry was some white waxy powder coated on the inside of a cylinder with one remarkable property – it didn’t stick to anything. The great idea was to get the Teflon to stick to at least one thing – like the surface of a pan, and not to the other thing – like the food in the pan. Teflon was an accident that became a great idea because curious scientists kept imagining more and more uses for this product, which over several decades of experimenting, became literally a household name.

Contrast that with the idea of the personal computer. In the ancient lore of computer science there is a tale of an IBM executive who tried to think up some uses for a computer in the home. He worked on it with his wife and came up with the idea of putting recipes on it. Other than that, they could not imagine why anyone would need such a device. Others (most notably perhaps the folks at Xerox PARC, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and two young men at Apple Computer) imaged a different future, and now personal computers are household appliances.

Without a creative imagination, there is nothing quite as worthless as a good idea, except perhaps a great idea.

The second element is continuous learning. A great idea wedded to an elegant design and then implemented thoughtfully is as close to a guaranteed winning formula as one is likely to get. Tinkering with the idea, paying attention to what information comes back, constantly improving even at the margins, never feeling satisfied, not thinking of a “finished product” are all part of this relentless learning.

An example of this is Al Gore’s presentation on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. He could have put a reasonably good presentation together and then presented it to various audiences and it would probably have been well received. Instead, he found highly skilled people who had the right tools to improve on his design, and then he kept changing the visuals after each presentation - constantly honing it, always looking on it as a work in progress.

Without continuous learning the imagination loses its creative edge and become mere daydreaming, or worse mindless repetition.

The third element is that all the stuff is small stuff, but not all the small stuff is worth sweating over. A great craftsman knows how to “fool the eye” and create a shortcut that will not be seen by the naked eye, and doing it “the long way” would not be a useful investment of time and energy. When this is done by a skilled craftsperson, it can take on all the attention to detail that the Shakers paid when they were constructing their furniture. When it is implemented thoughtfully, a shortcut is not the same as being lazy or inattentive.

The crucial notion here is to be disciplined enough in one’s work to know which of the “small stuff” is really worth sweating over. For instance, John Wooden is the former coach of the UCLA Men’s Basketball Team (now retired). His teams won ten national NCAA championships during his tenure. Coach Wooden once was asked what was the single most important thing for a player to do before a game begins. He said, I always tell my players to make sure that their shoes are tied.

Without critical thinking that leads to decisive action continuous learning degrades into a fruitless obsession in pursuit of the perfect.