Every Requirement Is Probably Wrong

Listened to a Founders podcast episode on the Elon Musk biography. Ended up with a lot of notes.

One line stopped me. Assume all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb.

I rarely question a process at work.

Not genuinely question it - trace it back to its origin, ask where it came from, decide whether it should still be there. I complain about processes sometimes. But complaining is different. Complaining means I'm frustrated. Questioning means I'm actually willing to challenge whether it should exist at all.

I don't do that enough. I just inherit things and treat them like facts.

A process exists, so I follow it. A constraint is given, so I work around it. I assume someone smarter made that decision for good reasons. I move on.

But most requirements weren't decided. They just accumulated. Someone did something a certain way once, it worked well enough, it became habit, habit became process, process became policy. Nobody sat down and designed it. It evolved by default. Which means nobody actually knows if it's right - including me, and I've been following it anyway.

Elon Musk has a rule about this. Every requirement must have a name attached to it - the specific person who created it. Not the team. Not the department. A person. And if you can't name them, or you can't explain why that requirement still makes sense today, it should be challenged.

The only truly immutable rules, he says, are the laws of physics. Everything else is negotiable.

He even applied the same thinking to government regulations - and didn't stop there either.

SpaceX has been in an ongoing fight with the FAA over launch approvals. The core complaint isn't about safety. It's about paperwork that moves slower than the rockets themselves. He said it publicly at a conference: it should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.

SpaceX published a piece calling some of the issues raised in the FAA's licensing process "patently absurd." He pushed for the resignation of the FAA chief. His argument was simple - the regulatory requirements weren't keeping up with reality, and nobody inside the system was questioning them because that's just how it had always worked.

Whether you agree with his methods or not, the underlying observation is hard to dismiss. Government requirements accumulated over decades, layer by layer, each one created for a reason that may or may not still apply. Nobody goes back to check. Nobody asks whose requirement this is and whether it still makes sense. It just gets added to the stack.

The result: it takes longer to get a launch license than to build the rocket.

That landed differently when I started thinking about my own work.

The weekly meetings I sit through. The approval chains I wait on. The tools I use not because they're the best but because that's what was already there when I started. None of it was deliberately chosen. It was just inherited - and I never thought to ask why.

The honest reason I don't question these things isn't because I think they're right. It's because questioning feels presumptuous. Someone smarter decided this. Someone with more context. Who am I to challenge it.

But that's exactly the problem. Most requirements don't have a smarter person behind them. They have a habit. An old decision made in a different context that nobody ever revisited.

It's not just work either.

I have personal requirements I've never questioned. The way I structure my days. The way I approach problems. Beliefs about how things should be done that I picked up somewhere years ago and have been carrying ever since. Not because I evaluated them and decided they were right. Just because they came with the territory and I never stopped to ask.

We all have requirements inherited from a previous version of ourselves. From an old job. From advice that made sense at the time. From a constraint that no longer exists.

They don't announce themselves as outdated. They just quietly shape everything.

This doesn't only happen at work.

It happens in personal habits too. The way you structure your mornings. The tools you use. The way you communicate with people. The way you make decisions. A lot of it was set up years ago under different circumstances, and it's been running on autopilot ever since. Not because it's optimal. Just because it never got questioned.

We all have requirements we inherited from a previous version of ourselves. From a job we no longer have. From advice that made sense at the time. From a constraint that no longer exists.

They don't announce themselves as outdated. They just quietly shape everything.

So the question worth sitting with - about any process, any tool, any habit, any meeting, any rule - is simple:

Who created this, and why does it still make sense today?

If the answer isn't clear, it's probably wrong. Not maliciously wrong. Not catastrophically wrong. Just never-questioned wrong. Which turns out to be the most common kind.

Most things that slow us down aren't inevitable. They're just inherited.

And inherited things have a way of feeling permanent until someone finally bothers to ask why.