Yi says: do your homework!

Someone should make a collection of Yi’s many and various ways of saying, ‘Get a grip.’

My site needs redesigning – so you can find what you’re looking for more easily, so I can add more things for sale and you can find those, too, and so on. I’ve decided that this time, I’ll employ a designer rather than doing it all myself, and I’ve found a couple to choose between. (That was pretty easy, actually – they’re the two, out of half a dozen or more, who responded when I contacted them!) So now I actually have a choice, I asked Yi:

“What’s the right guiding principle for choosing a designer?”

Answer: Hexagram 21, unchanging. Bite Through.

‘Biting through, creating success.
There’s harvest in making use of legal proceedings.’

To use ‘legal proceedings’ is to ask questions to get at the truth. Penetrating, determined, dogged questions. I’ve been shy of asking people things like, ‘How firm is that estimate?’ or ‘What happens if I, or the members of my site’s forum, don’t like the first design or two you come up with?’ It doesn’t quite seem polite. And I don’t want to take up too much of a busy professional’s time when I might still end up hiring someone else.

The spirit of Biting Through, though, is not one of beating decorously round bushes. It says, ‘get your teeth into the problem and keep gnawing away until you have clarity.’ I need to ‘take in’ everything involved – internalise the questions, the programming issues, the design possibilities – so I can present the requirements clearly and establish a firm understanding. Right now, there are definite areas where my fuzziness about what’s required gets in the way of a meeting of minds. (Like the fourth line in hexagram 21 is said to get in the way of a meeting of jaws.)

So… I find myself, not browsing round designers’ portfolios again, but instead drawing up a list of objectives, and questions to ask designers. I’ll let you know (here and at the I Ching Community) how it all goes. As for the list of Yi’s ways to tell people to get a grip, my own readings journal is evolving into a nice little anthology.