For those of us who are planning to study abroad, we’ll go from living in our conventional lives one day, to living in the unknown the next. In the time frame of a plane ride, we run into a new country and culture, where the only thing we can expect to be the “same” is our body and mind.
But in the case of a project like this, we’re investing a lot of money into the cart, and thus, failure comes at an expensive price. For me, this situation is more of a matter of learning through the process, making the necessary changes as they come about, and then, if we still fail, finding comfort in saying that we learned through failure.
Most people who know me, know that I’m a perfectionist. I’ll work on something until I feel no more work can be done to it. This is something Drew and I did with the cart’s design. The problem is that we built the design to such “perfection”, that when we handed it to Fernando (the cart manufacturer), we didn’t stop to question a single aspect of it.
For instance, we wanted the cart’s fruit compartment to be made of a special material that would keep the fruit cold. Fernando told us he could do this, and explained that the compartments would be made out of Styrofoam.
Did we question how long these compartments would last?
No. And we learned our lesson (it turns out that the Styrofoam is effective in keeping the fruit cold, but it forms mold quickly).
The point being that we need to question perfection. We have to think about all the possible ways something can fail, and have a solution to them, before making decisions. Drew and I should have asked Fernando how long this material would last us, or if he’d even recommended that we use it.
We went to visit the cart with the idea that we would simply have to explain to Fernando the details we wanted him to include in it, and we left with the task of having to rethink the entire interior design. Talk about change.
It happens quickly doesn’t it?