Yesterday evening I stayed up late trying to fix a bug in my computer program. I had a general idea what was causing it, but try as I might, I couldn’t track it down. This went on for several hours.
I didn’t feel like going to sleep without having done anything useful. So just before I retired, I put in a little kludge — a completely hacked work-around — so that the bug wouldn’t show up.
It wasn’t a solution, and the bug was still lurking somewhere in the code, but my kludge was making sure the bug wouldn’t produce any symptoms.
When I woke up this morning, I realized that if I knew enough to make the kludge work, then I knew enough to solve the underlying problem. I went back and made a small change, and sure enough, the first thing I tried was successful. I had fixed the bug!
What I then realized was that the very fact that I had known enough to create my kludge meant that somewhere, in the back of my mind, I already knew what the problem was. The knowledge just hadn’t yet percolated to the front of my brain.
The take-away lesson seems to be this: If you can’t figure out the solution to a problem, it’s ok to create a temporary fix. Your kludged up patch does not need to be elegant. It just needs to work.
The very fact that you have gotten this far means that your mind is on its way to the real solution. The kludge is your bridge to get there.
Getting something working, even if via the “wrong” solution, may be just the hint you need to get you the rest of the way.
This was really encouraging as I’ve often felt guilty from hacky temporary solutions. Thanks for the post!