Start with the Plan

Good engineering starts with a good plan with specific goals. The best engineers I have known are not the ones that are the smartest or most clever, but the ones who can distinguish between an engineering challenge for challenge sake and an actual problem that needs to be solved.
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I saw an Elon Musk video recently on the 5-step manufacturing process that had a quote I really appreciated: "The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist"