Building from Zero

I strive for better conditions. I strive for more quality time, or better economic conditions to take on on new endeavours. This is bad idea and it has been widely covered as such but there may be subtler reasons for starting before being ready.
Innovators weren’t nearly in the right conditions. Sometimes they tried and failed because they were so ahead of times.

Other times disparity is advantage. Sometimes shortage helps discovering or creating something big: legendary feats were often born out of compromise, because compromise forces out of the beaten path.
That why big breakthroughs often come from small shops, who need to take shortcuts that may lead into interesting new landscapes, rather than from big well funded entities that may afford the luxury to follow the usual comfortable path.
One of the most enlightening stories about this is the making of Mitsubishi A6M Zero.

In 1937 Imperial Japanese Navy sent out requirements for a new fighter plane with very stringent design requests. Mitsubishi entered the competition and appointed 33 years old Jiro Horikoshi as Chief Designer. Horikoshi faced a lot of engineering compromises during the design phase of the plane, as metallic construction was still relatively new and available Japan-made aeroplane engines at the time were hampered by lack of power. Instead of simply pull out of competition, Horikoshi and his team went great length to incorporate new and unproven materials and engineering features and every major weight-saving measure the engineering team could think of: thus the Mitsubishi A6M ‘Zero’ was born. This was before you could simulate everything in advance on computer and have an estimate of how well the design or a feature would fare. This was back when you had to invest time and resources to build a real prototype, and risk a test pilot to see if the plane would fail in flight and how well the design would behave. This was still a time when engineering designs where build completely out of inspiration and there was almost no guidance by computer or elaborate theories to guide your path and decisions. This was when engineering design was still flying solo, at night, with just your gut feeling as a compass.

Engines and lack of simulation notwithstanding, the Zero became one of the best dogfighters of the war, and a legendary fighter plane. With an impressive range of nearly 1500 miles and superb manoeuvrability the Zero achieved an astonishing kill ratio of 12:1, before becoming inevitably obsolete and only after tactics and opponents engineering eventually caught up.
The Zero was not created out of more experience, better times, better engines, or decision comfort by simulations. Because sometimes waiting is necessity, sometimes is just an excuse to avoid a steep path.