Start With the End Result

At Media Vision, I was carrying around a little insecurity. I had four years in the Air Force but no college degree, and I had started junior college on the GI Bill. I assumed the people doing the really technical work must have followed some long, formal path that I had missed.

Then one day Jim Rafferty walked over to my desk with a diskette. He had me type a DOS command, and a tiny, grainy video clip began playing on my computer. Today it would look like almost nothing. At that moment, I had never seen video play on a PC. It felt like the future had appeared in a very small window.

I asked Jim how long he had gone to school to learn how to do that. He told me he had never gone to school for it. So I asked the obvious next question: how did you figure it out? His answer has stayed with me ever since.

“I knew what the end result needed to be, so I worked backward from there.”

Jim was a serious pioneer in digital compression—a co-founder of C-Cube Microsystems—and at Media Vision he developed a proprietary video-compression technology called Captain Crunch. It was one of the early technologies emerging while the industry was figuring out how to make digital video practical on personal computers.

What changed me was not only the technology. It was the method. Jim knew what he wanted the machine to do, then worked backward until he understood every problem between here and there. That gave me permission to stop treating missing credentials as a locked door. If I could see the outcome clearly enough, I could learn my way toward it.