“Weinberg on Writing” Fieldstone Method Useful For Entrepreneurs

Gerald Weinberg wrote “Weinberg on Writing: the Fieldstone Method” to share many techniques he had perfected in writing more than 40 books and 400 technical articles. The method is very applicable to the exploration of a new market to find problem-solution fit and ultimately product-market fit.

Weinberg on Writing:
The Fieldstone Method

“Never attempt to write what you don’t care about.”
Gerald Weinberg in “Weinberg on Writing: the Fieldstone Method“

This is Weinberg’s first rule of writing. Appropriately translated, it also applies to entrepreneurs: don’t just do it for the money; pick a problem or customer set you care about and seek to solve it or improve their lives.

What You Learned In School Doesn’t Work

What You Learned In School Doesn’t Work: Instead of writing something, suppose you were building a stone retaining wall. If you’re a country folk like me–creative and resourceful–you go searching for fieldstones.

Finding particular stones for a fieldstone retaining wall–or finding particular ideas for an essay—resembles the problem of finding the last number on a bingo card. The first few stones come easily, but as the number needed decreases, so do your chances of finding just the one that fits your needs.

If you’re preparing to make a fieldstone wall and you don’t have a stone yard handy, you’ll have to accumulate a pile of stones, one or two at a time. During this gathering phase, you’ll traipse about in the fields of your life with an eye peeled for stones that might go into some wall, some day, some where. I have an uncountable collection of bits and pieces with no specific outcome in mind. I might use these some day. Then again, I might not.”
Gerald Weinberg in “Weinberg on Writing: the Fieldstone Method“

Taking an entrepreneurial approach to life means always collecting ideas and insights and trying to sell what you have–your skills, your current product, etc. In the same way that a writer has to fashion his books and articles out of what he observes–and takes care to record and remember–an entrepreneur needs to capture observations as raw material for his current or next business. Collecting problems is often more useful than working on solutions, especially problems that people would pay to have you solve.

One key aspect of the fieldstone method is that it builds on the observation that having a good idea requires you to have many ideas that you can filter, remix, and recombine to create something useful. In my experience, successful entrepreneurs are not struck by one big idea that they organize their life and business around. They have many ideas that they adapt, refine, and improve over time, fitting them into new situations and repurposing them for emerging needs. It’s like collecting a large variety of Lego blocks you can periodically take out and play with to create novel designs.

And just as Kierkegaard observed, “life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forwards.” Sometimes, we have experiences or see something that feels important and only realize how to apply it much later. If you don’t notice it and don’t remember it or write it down–if you don’t put it in your box of Legos–then you cannot pull it out later to complete your latest creation.

Successful Entrepreneurs Keep Their Eyes Open

The Fieldstone Method uses ideas as its “stones”—snatches of writing, photos, diagrams, quotations, pictures, and references that you find interesting. Using such a collection of “fieldstones,” you craft your “walls”—articles, reports, books, and scripts.

The Fieldstone Method also uses “stones of time”—chunks of available writing time of varying quality and duration—snatches of time such as ordinary people find available for writing, but seldom know how to use effectively. Out of such diverse material, you can build your beautiful walls without ever being stuck.”
Gerald Weinberg in “Weinberg on Writing: the Fieldstone Method“

This is a key strength of the approach, as it allows you to use small snatches of time and ideas in various forms to work on your current product or business and perhaps one or two new offerings you have percolating. There are risks with this approach–I say this as a blogger with not only 1600 posts published but another 1200 drafts in various stages of completion–that you can start much more than you finish, leaving “men on base” that never pay back the effort invested. In Weinberg’s case, I suspect he probably has notes for another 40 books that have yet to be written.

On balance, this may be the price you have to pay: to have a rich collection of unused or partially explored ideas so that the ones you actually incorporated into your product or business were the best available at that time.

Don’t Lose Insights: Write Them Down Immediately

Notecards and Pens
I don’t actually carry my portable computer everywhere, but I always carry my notecards and at least two pens. People laugh at me for looking like a geek with my notecards and pencils in my breast pocket—but I’ve noticed that nobody who’s laughed has ever written a book. My goal is never to be more than five seconds away from being able to capture a fine phrase or intelligent idea.
Gerald Weinberg in “Weinberg on Writing: the Fieldstone Method“

This is a key approach and one that I followed before I read the book–I had a boss in one of my first professional jobs who carried 3×5 cards with him wherever he went. The neat thing about 3×5 cards is that you can pull them out in the middle of a conversation–or pretty much anywhere (it’s still legal to jot on 3×5’s while driving, although I will warn you it seems to turn all the lights green)–and make a few notes and no one feels like you are still not paying attention. In fact, it can have the opposite effect: “Wow, this guy really cares what I just said enough to write it down.”

I keep a pad of paper by my bed so that when I wake at 3 in the morning, I can write down what I am worried about. For some reason, the act of falling asleep seems to release ideas so that I wake up and write them down and sometimes repeat the cycle a few times throughout the night.

A Startup is a Confusing Mess Until It Isn’t

The Fieldstone method doesn’t seem to be so secure and predictable. I remember an anesthesiologist telling me that a certain surgical procedure was like baking a cake:  “There are twenty-three steps, and only after the last step does it look like a cake. At every intermediate step, it looks like a mess.” To the untrained eye, Fieldstone writing also looks like a mess at every stage—until the book emerges magically at the end.
Gerald Weinberg in “Weinberg on Writing: the Fieldstone Method“

Alas, sometimes things remain a confusing mess, or the clarity you do achieve is about the lack of demand for your product or service–which is clarity of a sort. But there is the “startup dollhouse fantasy” that you can plan everything out in miniature and watch your startup become a real company. I think startups, like most living organisms, exhibit allometric scaling. Each subsystem grows at different rates, so if you look at an infant and their ratio of head to chest or legs to chest and compare that to an adult, you will see very different values: the legs and chest grow much more than the head.

Weinberg offers a number of techniques for organizing, juxtaposing, and remixing the building blocks of an article or book; here are several that could also be applied to customer interview stories,  notes from observing customers, requests for help in online forums, blog posts that detail customer needs or problems, etc.

• Pick at random
• Sort based on energy and keywords: use “10s” as anchors for piles.
  10s are the ideas or insights that you found most energizing.
• Use an Organizing Principle for Clusters
• Arrange into a Tableau (like Solitaire or the Periodic Table)
• Re-Arrange
• Outline
• What’s Missing?

Products and Teams Are About Finding Elements That Fit

Filling the Cracks

Drystone walls are made with no mortar, and they have higher status than mortared walls. Mortar doesn’t stand up to time as well as the stones do, and a wall that depends too heavily on mortar will not last without heavy maintenance.

Drystone walls last longer, and drystone walls that fit tightly without small rocks and wedges last longest, because small rocks and wedges eventually work their way out.
Gerald Weinberg in “Weinberg on Writing: the Fieldstone Method“

Finding a team members who can fit together and complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses is especially important for bootstrappers: it will be a while before you have a lot of free cash flow to “mortar” your team in place.

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