hacking away at the problem

We’re much more likely to make progress by hacking away at what we want to solve, examining the output, and iterating versus thinking or talking about it.

Even if you were to iterate somewhat aimlessly to start, throwing gobs of spaghetti at the wall, I imagine you’d get surprisingly good results over the all-too-cerebral alternative which involves you pondering about what strands of spaghetti you want to throw.

The first thing we try probably isn’t going to be the solution, but it will almost always point us to the next thing we ought to try, which will point us to the next thing to try after that until eventually, we arrive at a satisfactory solution.

To a certain degree, how fast you go through this cycle depends on how much you prefer doing relative to talking.