The importance of infrastructure
Whenever we set out to do something, most of the time, we require tools. Even a simple process of dish washing requires a sponge. One of the few exceptions is calisthenics — a type of physical exercise in which you use just your body weight and nothing else.
The more complex the action we want to carry out, the more sophisticated tools we need. That’s not the rule, but that’s usually how it goes.
At that point we encounter a nested dependency: in order to create our sophisticated tools, we first need to use other, simpler tools. This is obvious when you put it like that.
However, we often want to skip simple and boring tools and move on to more complex and exciting tools.
But the simple things that let us do our work are no less important. We could argue that they are even more important because they lay the foundation for things that are built on top of them. They provide infrastructure.
Should we call planning infrastructure as well? What about brainstorming ideas, picking the right decision for the smallest details?
They might seem unimportant, but they are, in a sense, infrastructure for greater things.