Sink or swim. Succeed alone or fail.
Thrown in the deep end. Given a difficult task with little preparation.
Trial by fire. A first test under real pressure.
Learn the ropes. Learn how things work by doing them.
Figure it out. Find the answer without being told.
Self-starter. A person who begins work without waiting for instructions.
Wear many hats. Do several jobs at once, often in a small company.
“See one, do one, teach one” is a saying of medical training. A trainee watches a procedure once, performs it once, and then teaches it to the next trainee. Sources credit the model to William Halsted, the first surgeon-in-chief of Johns Hopkins and founder of its surgical residency program. No source found shows that Halsted used the words himself.
A 2022 journal article notes that the “do one” step “has become less acceptable due to concerns regarding patient safety.”
Wendy Kopp developed Teach For America from her senior thesis at Princeton, where she graduated in 1989. Since 1990 its corps of college graduates has served as teachers.
New corps members trained in a summer institute before they took their own classes. In 2009 its training page said: “Five weeks is a short time to prepare corps members for the rigors of the classroom.” Later programs have divided the summer training differently.
Abraham Lincoln studied law on his own. He borrowed law books from John Stuart’s law office in Springfield. On September 9, 1836, he was licensed to practice law in Illinois.
On November 5, 1855, Isham Reavis asked him how to become a lawyer. Lincoln answered: “If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already.” His method was simple: “Get the books, and read and study them till, you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing.”
As a young printer’s apprentice, Benjamin Franklin found an odd volume of The Spectator, a periodical of essays. “I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it,” he wrote in his Autobiography.
He took notes on the essays, “making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence,” laid the notes aside for a few days, and then wrote the essays again from the notes. He compared his versions with the originals and corrected his faults.
In 1899 Elbert Hubbard published a short essay about a U.S. Army officer, Andrew Rowan, sent during the war with Spain to carry a message to García, a leader of the Cuban rebels. Its key line: “Rowan took the letter and did not ask, ‘Where is he at?'”
Hubbard set Rowan against an office clerk who answers a simple task with questions: “Who was he?” “Which encyclopedia?” “Was I hired for that?” The New York Central Railroad reprinted the essay in huge numbers, and it was used as promotional literature by Wanamaker’s, the Boy Scouts of America and the U.S. Navy. Hubbard claimed “Over forty million copies.” A 1977 estimate put the figure at about 4 million.
The story itself is largely false. Rowan’s real orders were to gather intelligence, and there is no evidence that he delivered a letter to García.
In Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, first self-published as a serial on his blog and released as a book in 2011, astronaut Mark Watney is left behind on Mars. He grows potatoes in the habitat, makes water from rocket fuel, revives the old Pathfinder lander to contact NASA and modifies a rover for a 3,235-kilometer drive.
In Ridley Scott’s 2015 film, Matt Damon’s Watney sums up his position: “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m gonna have to science the s— out of this.”
In the closing scene he says: “You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”
“Improvise, adapt, overcome” is an unofficial motto of the US Marines. The earliest record that the word researcher Barry Popik found is the 1986 film Heartbreak Ridge. Clint Eastwood plays a Marine gunnery sergeant. He tells his men: “You’re Marines now. You adapt. You overcome. You improvise.”
Some writers say Marines used the words long before the film. Popik found no printed evidence for that. By April 1988 Jack Clark was quoting it: “It’s like Clint Eastwood said, ‘You’ve got to improvise, adapt and overcome.'”
In January 1975 Popular Electronics put the Altair 8800 computer on its cover. Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw it. Gates was a 19-year-old Harvard student. Allen worked at Honeywell.
They called the maker, MITS, and said they had a BASIC for the Altair. They had no Altair and no code. They wrote the program in eight weeks on a simulator. Allen finished the loader on the plane to Albuquerque.
The first time the code ran on a real Altair was the demonstration itself. The machine answered two plus two with four. Microsoft was founded that April.
American development practice deliberately places people in roles beyond their current competence, on the argument that the growth happens there. Being underprepared is treated as the point rather than as a risk.