VI. Our Three Favorite Excuses for Not “Doing”

This article (7/7) is part of the series Principle of Action No. 2: Thinking with Your Hands, from the collection “The Other Path.”

There’s one last thing I have to say on this subject, and it’s not pleasant to hear: it’s time to stop making excuses for not “doing.”

None of what we’ve just explored is some closely guarded secret. Some of this research dates back to the 1960s, and many savvy practitioners have long since built it into their practice. And yet, in our organizations and our meeting rooms, we keep acting as if thought comes before action, and as if the body were a mere logistical detail. What follows applies just as much to organizations as to individuals: the excuses we’re about to examine work just as well at the scale of a team as at the scale of a single person.

Three Excuses, One Real Reason

“I don’t have time.”

We don’t have time to prototype, to test, to handle things, but we have time for three extra meetings debating an idea that fifteen minutes of testing would have settled, one way or the other. The problem isn’t time, it’s what we consider to be real work. Thinking in a meeting room looks like work, while building a cardboard model looks like tinkering. That implicit hierarchy is false.

“I’m not good with my hands.”

This objection is often voiced by people who send two hundred emails a day with remarkable dexterity. Your hands work fine. What’s missing is permission to use them. A prototype, even a poorly put-together one, often does its job better than a perfect PowerPoint deck.

“It’s inefficient.”

The apparent inefficiency of “doing” by hand is actually a form of delayed efficiency. You lose time negotiating with reality, but you gain understanding, humility, and the ability to adapt. It took me a long time, and a few fairly painful failures, to understand that my tendency to want to “have everything thought through” before starting wasn’t rigor — it was fear. Fear of being wrong in front of someone, or fear that visible imperfection would be mistaken for incompetence.

What I’ve learned since, and what the practice of illusion has taught me more clearly than any management book ever could, is that a mistake made in the moment teaches infinitely faster than a mistake merely imagined in advance. And above all, it teaches different things: things imagination alone would never have produced.

We’ve internalized a view of intelligence that separates it from the body, that values abstraction over experience. Changing that view is real work: it begins, as it always does, with a first concrete gesture.

Conclusion: The Other Wealth

We live in a civilization that made a bet: that the growing dematerialization and abstraction of our lives would enrich us. That we could gain in efficiency and information-processing capacity without losing anything essential along the way.

Rehabilitating the object and the practice isn’t turning our backs on progress. It’s refusing a certain impoverished conception of progress, one that confuses speed with intelligence and efficiency with skill. It’s recognizing that there are forms of knowledge AI won’t replace in kind. And that, as such, they deserve to be cultivated, passed on, and valued.

That requires working on the quality of your presence, being physically there, available to others. Organizations that manage to cultivate this embodied intelligence, this tacit knowledge that nothing can digitize, will have an advantage their competitors won’t be able to copy in a few clicks.

The man with the Moleskine, in that Parisian café, was quietly resisting. He was simply writing, but he was also practicing a rarer, and increasingly precious, skill: embodiment.