Great Engineering

I’d heard that AeroPress made amazing coffee. 

All the reviews were stellar, and it came highly recommended by Dave, my most trusted coffee aficionado. 

Yet, I owned the device for over a year without ever really making meaningful use of it.

Why? Because the barrier to entry, a one minute learning curve that was only slightly greater than zero, was enough to prevent me from using it.

I finally got so sick of garbage coffee at our cabin that I spent the minute required to learn the operations, and whammo, I was making better coffee than our home french press.

The coffee is amazing, the operation is so simple, and the cleanup is painless.

I was embarrassed that it sat in my cupboard for years, simply because of the tiny effort of training.

The moral of the story is that amazing engineering exists, it is a dream to engage with it, and AeroPress is one example of many.

The second moral is how pathetically low the barrier to entry is for so many things in life, and if we applied a tiny bit more energy and effort, we would see disproportionate results.

If you have something you want others to adopt, a method, or a technology, assist them by making it so easy that it is fun to learn… then make it even easier.

• Now that’s a peak ethos.