The Loop Towards Mastery

Brandon has been chasing a strange question for a long time: why does he love engineering simulation as much as he loves cooking, storytelling, and bowling? The answer showed up while watching the show The Bear. Underneath all of it is the same pursuit, not perfection, but mastery, the kind of deep understanding that quietly makes every decision better.

This episode maps out a "reversibility spectrum," from a CAD edit you can undo in minutes to decisions you can never take back, a bridge, an aircraft delivery, a medical implant, moments where reality only gives you one chance to find out if you were right. We revisit two stories already told on this podcast, Gustave Eiffel betting his fortune on a tower that might not stand, and Daniel Burnham racing an unmovable deadline to build the White City.

Along the way, a quiet shift in thinking: experience doesn't build mastery, feedback does. 

Join me as we explore:

1. Why engineering has always been about decision-making, not perfect design
2. The four levels of the "reversibility spectrum," and why irreversible decisions demand the most mastery
3. What Gustave Eiffel and Daniel Burnham's irreversible bets can teach us about high-stakes decision-making
4. Why feedback, not experience, is what actually builds mastery
5. How simulation tools accelerate the feedback loop engineers need to build judgment

Transcript

Welcome to the Engineering Passion Express. I'm your host, Brandon Donnelly, and on this episode, we're going to talk about the loop towards mastery. There's a question I've been thinking about for a long time.

Why do I love simulation, particularly engineering simulations, not the big universal simulation theory that we'll hear about from time to time on the internet, on the surface, it doesn't make much sense if you know me, if you look at schooling, it might, I went to graduate school because I wanted to understand the fundamentals of physics behind engineering problems. I love the elegance of equations, the complexity of systems and the challenge of predicting how something will behave possibly before it even exists. But when I look at the other things in life that I love, simulation seems completely disconnected.

I love cooking. I love storytelling. I love bowling.

What could those possibly have in common with finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, or other engineering simulation domains? The answer came to me while watching a show called The Bear. The show follows a chef named Carmi who is trying to build something exceptional while also figuring out what the pursuit means for his own life. What struck me about it was that the kitchen, engineering, and all of these other things I love are actually the same pursuit.

They're all about chasing mastery, not perfection, because perfection doesn't really exist. Mastery is the pursuit of understanding something so deeply that your decisions become better. A great chef doesn't just follow a recipe.

They understand the ingredients, temperature, timing, texture, how small changes create different outcomes. A great bowler doesn't just throw a ball. They read the lane, understand the friction, see how the oil is moving, and predict how the ball will react and adapt before a failure like even leaving a single 10 pin happens.

A great storyteller doesn't just describe events. They understand people and emotion and cause and effect and why certain moments charge us up and why certain moments change us. And great engineers do the same thing.

They make decisions. What materials should we use? What constraints matter? What trade-offs are acceptable? What assumptions are safe? The difference is that engineers often make decisions in situations where reality only gives you one chance to find out if you were right. And that raises a question.

How do you develop mastery? When the decisions you make are the ones where failure is the

most expensive. Now, again, engineering is about decision-making, the choice of design criteria, the choice of optimization, the choice of design parameters, the choice of constraints to use or to disregard. And all of these items live on a reversibility spectrum.

So if you imagine maybe four levels of reversibility of your decisions, the first level is easily reversible. You can edit a CAD model. You can change a requirement.

You could rerun an analysis. And most of these probably live with a cost of minutes of someone's time. Level two is maybe moderately reversible.

Build another prototype, order different components, machinery, vise part. The cost of these things would probably typically be days or weeks. Level three would be something it's like expensive to reverse.

Whether that's time or capital, it's reworking tooling, it's changing suppliers, it's restarting a certification, it's reconfiguring production, it's measured in months or significant capital. And maybe you also factor in lost revenue because of how far things were pushed back. Level four, I call nearly irreversible because very few things are totally irreversible except for things like death.

So nearly irreversible is, say, a product launch. It's a bridge construction beginning. It's the delivery of an aircraft.

It's a medical device implementation. It's space missions. And the cost is safety, life, full price of full replacements.

Reality is now your teacher and reality is expensive. When we come back from a quick break, we're going to talk a little bit about some historical cases and think through some of their irreversibilities and understand why the need for mastery is something worth pursuing. This is a quick break from the Engineering Passion Express.

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Now we've done a couple of historical story episodes on this podcast. Two that come to mind are Gustav Eiffel and Daniel Burnham. Gustav Eiffel built the Eiffel Tower, but the part that's really nerve-wracking is that he bet a significant portion of his existing fortune on it.

If you've worked for 50 years and all of a sudden your entire fortune is riding on something, you

want to have some level of certainty. You better have a level of mastery in that domain that's very high. Daniel Burnham was tasked with building the White City for the World's Fair.

And that had an opening day and a timeline to build huge buildings and create a city out of nothing. And at some point, the decisions that are made cannot be reversed because then the timeline won't be hit. And so that creates a need for somebody who's truly a master of organizing people, understanding decision-making criteria, and working really hard to make sure that no bad decisions are made that are going to blow up the whole project.

And so there's a relationship here. As reversibility decreases, the need for mastery increases. Do you want someone who's dabbled in anatomy or do you want a master surgeon when you need a heart transplant? You obviously know the answer to that question.

Mastery is the ability to consistently make good decisions under uncertainty. Not because you know everything, but because you've developed a high level of judgment. If you take that surgical example, once they get you open, there's a number of things that can change about your body.

And the conditions that they didn't know or understand, or is a response to them operating on you. And the reason you want that master surgeon is because as the operating environment changes, you want somebody who's making good decisions that's going to keep you safe, that's going to have you heal up quickly, that's not going to create a problem that didn't exist before the surgery. As a quick thought experiment, take two equally talented engineers at the same point in their career, they've gone through the same classes, they get hired on at two different companies in a similar domain, one receives daily feedback, the other receives feedback about their designs every six months.

Which one will have confidence, insight, and good judgment sooner? In your head, you've probably said the daily feedback one, obviously. That's because the learning loop is observe, predict, act, get feedback, and repeat, and as you repeat more and more times, your predictions get better, the feedback from your actions matches your predictions, and you've become closer to becoming a master. And there's a little mental model shift here, in that most people believe experience creates mastery.

Well, if that was the case, and both of those engineers in our thought experiment, equally talented, starting at the same time, two different companies, one receives more feedback than the other, two years later, they both have two years of experience, so they should both be equal in their level of mastery of their craft, but they won't be. So instead, the mental model you need is that feedback creates mastery. Experience is a flawed proxy that we use to measure the likelihood someone has received the proper feedback, but it's not reality, it's only a proxy.

And if you tie this in, there's actually a little bit of a paradox here. The biggest, most irreversible decisions requiring the greatest mastery provide us the fewest opportunities to learn. That's the

challenge in front of us.

I've worked in the simulation software space, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, multibody dynamics, acoustic simulation, electromagnetic simulation, all of these tools are meant to do one thing. Increase your mastery of the items you designed. They aren't about crunching numbers.

They are about understanding, seeing clearly the differences materials make, seeing clearly the trade-offs, making it all possible to be communicated. Without these tools, the path to mastery would be longer. And that's not hypothetical.

We know that engineers used to take much longer to understand systems at the level of complexity that they're understood today. A chef gets feedback from tasting the food. A bowler gets feedback from watching the ball motion and the pins fall.

An athlete gets feedback from the score or the performance on the field. But engineers often build things where the feedback comes months, years, or even decades later. A bridge doesn't tell you immediately if your assumptions were wrong.

An aircraft doesn't tell you immediately if your decisions were wrong. A medical device doesn't give you a second chance to redesign it after it's in someone's body. Reality is the ultimate feedback system, but reality is expensive.

Reality charges full price. And that's why simulation matters. It isn't about replacing experience.

It isn't about making engineering less human. It is about accelerating the process that creates master engineers. It allows engineers to see clearly, test ideas faster, understand trade-offs earlier, and build judgment to make decisions when those decisions matter the most.

But ultimately, engineering has never been about creating perfect designs. It's always been about making the best decisions with the information available. And the engineers that master the process are the ones who can take uncertainty and turn it into something the world can rely on.

That's where I'll leave you today on the Engineering Passion Express. Thanks for joining us. And I look forward to having you on the next episode.

This is your host, Brandon Donnelly. Another heartfelt thank you for listening this far. You are much appreciated.

And I hope this episode has made you think about your craft and your mastery of it. I still have that next story episode in the works, and I'm working on getting some guest interviews you may like as well. I'm looking forward to mastering the craft of making this podcast in the coming months and years.

If you could provide any feedback on it, that would certainly help my pursuit of mastery. You can email that feedback to brandon.donnellyathey.com. You can find the email in the show notes for the proper spelling. And I'd love to hear from you and we'll do my best to respond.

Have a great rest of your day. And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Engineering Passion Express.