You just dropped your house key down a street drain.
Most people call a locksmith. Angus MacGyver grabbed a wire coil and a car battery, built an electromagnetic retrieval device, and moved on with his day.
That was his thing. Lightbulb filaments as fuses. A paperclip to short-circuit electronics. A chocolate bar to plug an acid leak (the sugar in the chocolate crystallized when it touched the acid, forming a seal).
It’s not just some early ‘90s TV gimmick. There’s deep wisdom in “MacGyvering” problems.
In World War II, Wehrmacht General Erwin Rommel, the “desert fox,” had to outwit and outmaneuver a much larger British Force. To create confusion, he attached ordinary brooms to the sides of his tanks. When they drove to the sands of North Africa, they kicked up dust that made his small force seem much larger than it really was. The British second-guessed themselves.
When American G.I.s moved into the wintry Ardennes Forest in Belgium, their burlap and brown uniforms stuck out against the snowy surroundings. They pulled white bedsheets and curtains from empty houses. Problem solved.
The marketplace works the same way.
Dropbox didn’t have a finished product, so they made a demo video pretending they did. The waitlist exploded.
In the very early days of Uber, there was no dispatch system. Founders coordinated rides manually, by texting drivers. Doordash was similar. They used a Google form to take orders, which the founders delivered themselves.
Zappos wasn’t sure people would buy shoes online, so Tony Hsieh photographed shoes in stores, sold them, then ran back to buy and ship them.
None of these companies waited until they had enough.
The leaders worth following never use a lack of resources as a reason to wait. They use it as an invitation to get creative.
As Winston Churchill said, “Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we have to think.”
