Habits

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. That is a truism.

I think the meaning behind the saying is that in order to produce something of value you have to put something in. If you want to eat an omelette you have to sacrifice having whole eggs in the fridge (or where ever you keep your eggs). But I want to focus on another fact. The fact that when doing anything of value, there is a path of steps along the way to the finished product. All tasks can, and must, be broken down into subtasks.

Have you ever received a bill or an estimate from a contractor and just balked at the amount? I know I have. Then, when looking at the specification, the breakdown of costs, the total amount comes into context. Adding things up, the amount does seem a lot more reasonable than it was before I saw the breakdown.

Or, in some cases, maybe the breakdown reveals where the unrealistic total amount stems from. Maybe the amount of hours is inflated, maybe there is excessive material costs. Either way, the breakdown is crucial for understanding.

You can solve problems by breaking them down in different ways. One way is to take the problem statement and simply asking why. This leads to a new statement, to which you can again ask the question why. And then repeat this cycle until arriving at a level where you have a subproblem to solve. Nice!

But then there also the question of how when posed with a problem statement. Asking how is useful in arriving at a more concrete problem statement.

Using these methods in combinations is sometimes described as Abstraction Laddering. Asking why to reach other abstraction levels is moving up the ladder from the current problem statement. Asking how is moving down the ladder.

I would like to inject that I think that asking how is not always right. In search of more precision in a statement you can also ask when or where, depending on the nature of the problem.

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