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August 9, 2018

You cannot build something you do not understand.

Architects need to be more than just creative people. They need to understand form and function, structural and material engineering, thermodynamics, and many more things to succeed. An architect must understand these areas because without the understanding they are likely to introduce some fundamental flaw.

This thought came after watching Ready Player One on a flight. It was a good book (not great, but good). But the movie stripped out everything that made the book good in a vain effort to give the movie mass appeal. Why bother understanding what made the book popular when you can strip the story down and use it as another boy meets girl teen save the day movie.

If you do not understand something, you can’t hope to build it. A few examples:

  • You can’t build an ERP system without understanding all of the ways a large business needs to run.
  • You can’t design a distribution network if you don’t understand the mechanics of moving products from manufacturing to customers.
  • You can’t take on Facebook without understanding why people keep coming back to it.

This is why pure technologists fail to build ground-breaking apps. Understanding technology is not enough, you need to understand your target subject matter as well. Similarly, no one in real estate can build tech for the industry without understanding how tech works. You also can’t take two separate people with two separate knowledge sets and hope that they can blend it successfully.

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Related

1 thought on “You cannot build something you do not understand.”

  1. Izydor7646 says:
    August 23, 2018 at 7:08 am

    Dzięki wielkie za fajne porady. Nie znam się na tego typu działaniach – bardzo mi pomogliście! Niech żyje Internet 🙂

    Reply

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