I’m working on a pretty elaborate VOIP project right now and someone on the AllStarLink forum questioned why I was spending so much time “reinventing the wheel.” It’s a fair question, and certainly relevant given how much of my life has been spent reinventing various wheels, axles, transmissions, breaking systems, and other well-proven technologies.

In my experience, the best way to really understand a technology is to try to implement it yourself. You can read the books, take the classes, and watch the YouTube videos, but there is no substitute for sitting in front of a blank screen and trying to copy something with your own hands. There are 100’s of subtle details lurking below the surface of a system of modest complexity, none of which can be appreciated (let alone understood) by simply watching the highlight reel. Not to mention the AI summary …

A time-honored training method used by artists is called the “Master Copy” in which the aspiring student attempts to reproduce a great masterwork. “Art begets art,” says Daniel Graves, a well-known painter and founder of the Florence Academy of Art, “and nothing is more useful for an art student than to copy a great master painting.” Supposedly Chopin began his piano practice every day with some preludes and fugues from Bach’s 48. I spent two weeks in Maine last summer at the The Wooden Boat School where a bunch of us spent hours a day in a shop trying to accurately reproduce a wooden dory designed by George L. Chaisson, the legendary builder from the North Shore of Massachusetts.

I once had the chance to work with Dragomir Krgin, a famous expert in the field of bond market conventions from Merrill Lynch, or at least as famous as you can get working in such an esoteric field. I would approach Dr. Krgin with a question about some obtuse nuance in the “true yield” calculation used for Italian government bonds and he would refuse to answer my question directly. Instead, he would pull out his yellow pad and derive every answer from first principles (present value is the sum of the discounted future cash-flows). This could take hours, but I came to appreciate how the ease with which he could reinvent the “wheels” in his space allowed him to navigate complicated problem with confidence and authority.

There is something about the process of replicating the work of the great masters that prepares your hands to do great work of your own.