The Origins of OVER DID IT
Where I went to high school (the creatively named Patterson High School in Patterson CA), telling someone they "over did it" was a put-down, suggesting you were not exhibiting a proper cool reserve or were otherwise engaged in activities that were frowned upon by the cool-kids. At a certain point, however, a few of us started to take pride in "over doing it".
The first truly solid manifestation of this spirit was in Mr Strope's U.S. History class. Strope would write some stuff on the chalk board... you would copy it down... and after a couple weeks you handed your notes in to prove you were listening (in theory). He would always label each day's notes as "N/#" (# being a number in sequence: N/1, N/2, etc). Two bored friends of mine (Shane Washburn and David Silvera) and I started to dress up our notes with art around the borders. The dressed up borders very quickly came to take up FAR more time and effort than the notes themselves.
I've still got 5 series worth of those notes. The first set just got fancy with the N/# business. In the second series, I used roman numerals (N/I, N/II, etc). I spelled everything out in the third series (Notes Three, Notes Four, etc).
O.D.I., of course, always demanded something more... so for the fourth series I started going to the library to look up how to spell things in different languages (Adnotatio Tres <latin>, Tieng Bor <vietnamese>, etc). I'm not sure I was using the words exactly right, but that didn't exactly matter. Around the fifth series, the other two ODIers had given up on the one-upmanship, but I managed to take it one step further and started visiting the county-branch library in Modesto to look up languages that didn't use the latin alphabet (Hebrew, Hindi, etc).
By this point, however, I was putting so much work into the research side of things, that the artistic application started to suffer. I think my best work came in Series 3 and 4, when there was still some balance.
I didn't analyze all of this very much back then, but I think about it a lot nowadays. I find great value in taking an idea further than one might consider reasonable - it's the original ODI Spirit. But I also recognize one of the potential pitfalls to this process - how focusing solely on a narrow scope of a project can cause other aspects to suffer, and thereby cause the project as a whole to suffer. Successful Over Doing It requires a broad view and a good balance. The grand execution of a decent idea can be more successful and rewarding than a merely decent execution of a grand idea. Execution matters.
