Jeff Wang Blog

If you’ve ever gone camping and tried to start a fire with nothing but small twigs, weeds, whatever you can find in the woods, and a few matches, you know how hard it is.

There are three methods (that I know of) for preparing the set of twigs to burn: tent formation, box, or just throw everything in one pile.

One of the most important things for starting a fire is knowing when to start over…if you throw in the lit match, and the fire doesn’t catch on the wood, you need to fix the formation. Maybe the twigs were too big, or you didn’t give enough space and oxygen for the fire to burn, or maybe there weren’t enough smaller weeds to burn.

It doesn’t mean you need to give up on starting the fire, it just means you need to know when to try a different method, or else you will never know that just throwing all the twigs in a small pile and hoping that will burn never works.

Keep trying and you’ll be able to start a fire in all the projects you’ve been trying to start.