Undertaking restoration without a basic understanding of succession is like driving without a license.  The urgent business of repairing severely damaged habitats can benefit greatly by incorporating lessons learned from 110 years of studying succession.  In turn, knowledge about successional change can benefit from carefully conducted restoration activities.  Typical problems faced by trying to restore without understanding succession include inadequate site stabilization, improper manipulation of soil nutrients, mismatches between available propagules and the local environment, unsuccessful species mixtures, arrested trajectories, or goals that are too narrow.  Examples of such problems in severely disturbed habitats undergoing primary succession will be explored from Iceland, New Zealand and the United States.