Folding the Box
Pick a flap, any flap
One of my favorite pet analogies when I’m feeling stuck is what I like to call “Folding the Box.” To get the gist, think of a cardboard receptacle like the one pictured below, closed by means of interlocking flaps:
When you look at this photograph, you can’t tell which side was folded first. (Actually, in this particular photo, you can tell, but that’s just because I had a hard time finding a high-quality image.) I remember looking at boxes like the one above as a child and thinking they were a kind of magic trick. Like a Escher illusion made of of cardboard, it seemed impossible that all four flaps should simultaneously fit over and under the adjacent corner:
As I got a little older, a hazy explanation for these miraculous tapeless boxes began to form in my mind—the kind of model that takes shape in the background without you ever realizing or stopping to articulate it. I imagined the flaps descending simultaneously at the perfect speed and angle to fit both over and under their neighbors: gliding into place like the leaves of a collapsible veggie steamer. Even today, looking at finished boxes like the one above, I take a strange satisfaction in the fantasy that this is how they came into being.
But of course that creation myth is just a fantasy. As anyone who’s tried it will tell you, the real way people close boxes without tape is by folding the second flap over the first flap, folding the third flap over the second flap, and then jamming the fourth flap into place under the first. It may not be pretty, but it gets the job done.
When we look at an impressive finished product—a book, a film, a well-made website—or admire someone at the top of their field, it’s easy to imagine that the pieces magically snapped into place. We find it inconceivable, extrapolating backwards, that the characters, plot, and setting of a story (elements which seem inextricable in the version we’re consuming) could ever have existed independently. We find it absurd that the tech CEO was anything other than the innovator-salesman-manager they are today. Perhaps they operated at a smaller scale, we think. Perhaps they weren’t as polished. But all the parts were there, gliding into place simultaneously.
I prefer a less glamorous explanation. Maybe the idealized model is true for some, but in my experience development is rarely this continuous. Instead, people and projects alike go through periods of disequilibrium in which some flaps are “folded” and others are not, and there’s some awkward jamming of corners in the process of reaching a new, stable synthesis; eventually everything fits where it’s supposed to, and no one else can perceive the clunky transitional phase.
In practical terms, this means that when you face a difficult chicken-and-egg problem for how to move forward, it’s usually best to just start somewhere and iterate until coherence emerges. Do this enough and the box will form, and no one will be able to tell how it was made.
If I didn’t know better, I’d even call it magic.