Stewart Brand

And you get a wrong theory, and you can really—

wind up hurting your motorcycle because you start panicking and, well, it must be this, it must be this, it must be this, and you go down some wrong path and you're doing harm on the way.

One of the important things about repairs, a repair is a trauma for the thing that you're trying to fix.

And if you do it wrong, you can make the problem, either the original problem worse or introduce some new problem.

So now you've got two layers of confusion in there.

So one wants to be delicate.

And one of the things that skilled maintainers talk about is if it's a problem you don't completely understand, just stop and ponder.

and uh pressing is especially good you just stare at it just stare at it you're like a fisherman waiting for a nibble and a nibble may well come yeah uh and if that doesn't quite do it then just read everything don't pose it ahead with all your wrong theory because uh it's going to make things worse

It's dependent on the situation.

Yeah.

the system, the person, the tools they have at hand.

One of the great things about Robin Knox Johnson, the guy who won the Golden Globe sailboat race, was that he could improvise solutions where

nobody else could.

For example, his charger stopped working and he went inside it and figured out, oh yeah, okay, there's a place where there's some grease on the system here and grease that off and then put it back together.

And oops, I don't have a way to measure the distance that's supposed to be in the gap here.

And

And without that, how could he set the gap for the spark plug, I guess, or something like that?

And then he figured out, wait a minute, let's see, how many pages of my logbook here does it take to make an inch?

Let's see, this is a tiny fraction of an inch.

That would be like five pages.