A student asked me recently “so why did it take six years to design?”.

A simple and elegant product almost always makes you think “why didn’t someone think of this earlier” or “what took so long”. Engineering is like sculpture, though. You can hack the rough shape out in just a few minutes. Then it might take days or weeks to get the curves just right and smooth out the rough places. Plus a few years to learn how.

Today I drafted our first newsletter in six months. But first I spent some time reading up (again) on how to write an effective newsletter and thinking about how to apply those lessons to our situation. Even after several drafts today, there will be more revisions tomorrow before I send it out to the advisory board for review. Here’s the latest draft: commongoodbank.com/emails/20081015.html