Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

INTRODUCTION

Making is more than the physical act of building. It’s dancing, it’s sewing. It’s cooking. It’s writing songs. It’s silk-screening. It’s breaking new trails both literally and figuratively. Making, as my friend Andrew Coy, the former White House Senior Advisor for MakingI

under President Obama, says, is simply a new name for one of the oldest human endeavors: creation.

Making things has driven me ever since I can remember. It’s also been my employment forever, or nearly so. First, as a jack of all trades in the theater scene in New York and San Francisco in the mid-1980s and early 1990s; then as a model maker for commercials and movies; and finally for a solid fourteen-year stretch as a producer, science communicator, and serial blower-upper of things on MythBusters.

When people who’ve achieved some public success write about their lives, often their experiences get charted like a purposeful, linear climb up a mountain toward a summit of achievement. There is often the perception that all of that person’s life was driven toward some goal either by fate or personal ambition. Whether it’s winning an Olympic medal or founding a Fortune 500 company or going to the moon, the story always seems to arc the same way. Life stories always look like straight lines from the vantage point of looking back, but precious few really are. My story certainly isn’t.

My story is more of a path with many forks. There was a general direction I wanted to head, and a vague sense where I wanted to end up—LEGO designer! Star Wars special effects guy!—but at each of those forks, when I actually reached them, the decisions I made in the moment were based mostly on circumstances and opportunities that were directly in front of me. Some turns were wrong, some turns were right, some turns were just weird but then became right with time, like with MythBusters.

The fandom that Jamie Hyneman and I encountered from MythBusters was by no means broad-based, but as narrow as it was, it was twice as deep, because at that time there just wasn’t a robust making community for young creatives to tap into. This is not to say that I was some kind of trailblazer. In fact, quite the opposite. I was following well-trod paths carved by generations of makers who came before me. But I think one of the reasons the show became so popular is that what we were doing was kind of an anomaly. Even though we could tell from the fans that there was still a love of making out there in the ether, it seemed that fewer people were taking up hammers to do the kinds of things that I was interested in. There was a lack of young people who were getting any practice working with their hands and their hearts to make things that were important to them. To create.

There are probably a million factors that contributed to why this was happening—the rampant elimination of high school and early-grade shop classes through the 1980s and 1990s, an over-fixation on graduate degrees, a focus on technology and/or finance as primary modes for upward mobility, too many screens. I’m not a sociologist or an anthropologist, so I don’t have a full explanation for what I was seeing, just that I was finding it more and more difficult to find meaningful populations of good young makers to share ideas with.

Sometime in the mid-2000s that began to change, thanks in part to advances in rapid-prototyping technologies like 3-D printers, open-source software, and the spread of broadband internet. This DIY maker movement that emerged empowered young people, underprivileged communities, and the simply curious to learn, and teach, and share how to make things again. I also deeply credit Dale Dougherty, who founded Make: magazine in 2005 and offered a vision of an updated Popular Mechanics that felt like it was pulled directly from my wildest dreams. It was the perfect flagship for making, celebrating a broad constellation of creativity defined by tackleable projects and learnable practices.

Maker Faire was founded soon after in San Mateo, California, and a community was born. I’m proud to say I’ve been a part of the faire from the very beginning and I’ve given a talk almost every year since its inception. Over time it’s come to be known as my annual Sunday sermon (a name I was unaware of for the first several years). Every year my subject is different, but inevitably I conclude with some kind of exhortation to keep making stuff, to keep creating, and to keep pushing past self-perceived limits. Because more than anything else, what I continue to fight against is all the ways in which the tools of creation are kept out of the hands of our most dynamic, creative minds. Whether it is because of apathy, lack of access, bureaucratic inertia, community indifference, or educational redlining, I don’t care. The world needs more makers.

After the talk, I take a couple hours to meet fellow makers. It’s always my favorite meet and greet of the year. We share stories and take pictures and I ask people what they’re making, because even if they’re nervous, their enthusiasm for what they’re currently building always wins out. Give a maker the chance to tell you about the thing they’re putting their time into, and good luck getting them to stop!

In one of the first years of the Maker Faire, a young man came up and said kind of sadly, I don’t make, I code. I’ve heard this sentiment a lot. I don’t make, I __________ . Fill in the blank. Code, cook, craft (not sure why all my examples start with C), the list of exceptions people invent to place themselves on the outside of the club of makers is long and, to me, totally infuriating. Because the people who do that to themselves—or more likely, the people who TELL them that—are flat wrong.

CODING IS MAKING! I said enthusiastically to that young man. Whenever we’re driven to reach out and create something from nothing, whether it’s something physical like a chair, or more temporal and ethereal, like a poem, we’re contributing something of ourselves to the world. We’re taking our experience and filtering it through our words or our hands, or our voices or our bodies, and we’re putting something in the culture that didn’t exist before. In fact, we’re not putting what we make into the culture, what we make IS the culture. Putting something in the world that didn’t exist before is the broadest definition of making, which means all of us can be makers. Creators.

Everyone has something valuable to contribute. It is that simple. It is not, however, that easy. For, as the things we make give us power and insight, at the same time they also render us vulnerable. Our obsessions can teach us about who we are, and who we want to be, but they can also expose us. They can expose our weirdness and our insecurities, our ignorances and our deficiencies. Even now, at fifty-one years old as I write this, I am enduring a frightening vulnerability with this book.

I didn’t know how to write a book before I wrote this one. Like most of the things I’ve learned throughout my life, I learned about the writing process by going through it. It was surprisingly complex and fairly difficult. As I’ll talk about in the pages to come, I like projects that have high levels of complexity, so in theory I should have been able to handle something like this, but the reality was that I was wholly unprepared for the Gordian knot inherent in organizing my thoughts over dozens of thousands of words. I count many friends who are published writers, whose livings come from making books, and my hat is off to them, because books are hard. They are scary. What is here is both deeply personal and, I hope, educational. And to be perfectly honest, I’m satisfied with the results of my efforts on a level I didn’t expect. This is the risk of all creative spirits: every project has as many obstacles as solutions, and with each one there is the chance that one might not end up satisfied with the results; or that others might not be satisfied with them, either, and can’t wait to tell you about it.

This is one of the main reasons I believe that adolescence can be so fraught for so many. Just as we start to catch the barest glimpses of our true selves and begin to understand what it is about the world that fascinates and intrigues us, we often run right into people who aren’t ready to be encouraging and can be downright hostile to someone being different. It can be a terrible early lesson in what is safe to share about ourselves. In this sense, proclaiming and revealing a deep curiosity—an obsession—to others is to show them our bellies. When my dogs roll on their backs and let me scratch their bellies, they’re paying me the high compliment of their own vulnerability. They’re showing me the deepest trust.

Kids, on the other hand, can be cruel. Not all of them, but enough that adolescence is when a lot of people learn to hide their true selves, to bury their creative interests and creative instincts, in an act of self-preservation. The tonic to this is to find people you can trust and show your belly to: a best friend, a social group, a sangha. In that regard, it’s never been a better time in history than right now for finding your people. The internet is far from fulfilling its promise to be the compendium of all human knowledge, it’s more like the outline or the index. But where it shines is in giving people all over the planet the ability to find a peer group of enthusiasts with which to share their creativity, and thus themselves. That’s a net good. When we find our people, we find in them the permission to explore, to exult, and to share.

This book is my attempt to share my explorations with you. It is a chronicle of my life and the lessons I’ve learned along the way, and it is also a permission slip. The permission slip is from me, to you. It says you have the permission to grab hold of the things you’re interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you. You might not need that permission. If that’s the case, good for you! Go forth and do awesome things. But I have needed that permission many times in my life. And whenever I found it, it helped me uncover secrets about myself and about the world I live in. It made me better as a man, as a maker, and as a human being.

We are built to collaborate. Humans are explorers, and social creatures. We are driven to share our stories. Our stories are what make us so unique on this planet. I mean ostensibly unique. There might be great speculative fiction being promulgated among the octopus and cuttlefish communities, or delightfully wry oral histories being shared between orca, or gray wolves, but until we can decipher them it’s humans alone who expand our understanding of the universe by swapping stories about what we see and have seen. Making is one of the principal ways we share, and have always shared, our stories.

The structure of Every Tool’s a Hammer changed several times in the course of its writing. It’s quite a different book than I thought it would be when I began, which is funny because that is, in fact, one of the throughlines of the book now that I can see it as a whole: that nothing we make ever turns out exactly as we imagined; that this is a feature not a bug; and that this is why we do any of it. The trip down any path of creation is not A to B. That would be so boring. Or even A to Z. That’s too predictable. It’s A to way beyond zebra. That’s where the interesting stuff happens. The stuff that confounds our expectations. The stuff that changes us.

The book is broken into four main sections. The first deals with motivation and the physics of creativity. I consider healthy obsession to be the gravity that binds us to the things we make. I believe that to be excellent at anything you need to be at least somewhat obsessed with it, and this section explores how to use obsession to find ideas and execute them.

The second section deals with the notion of witnessing how you work, and noticing what it can tell you about how to work better. I look at how time can substitute for skill when engaged in the unfamiliar, and how small amounts of extra time invested in early stages can save massive amounts of time on the other end. Finally, I get into how to see yourself and your work habits in the context of your work and also how to widen that circle of awareness to include others so that you can share what you’re doing with them. Making can often be solitary, but I find it’s vastly more fun as a community exercise.

The third section deals with tolerance. Both as an engineering term and as a meta term of art. When we say we need to teach kids how to fail, we aren’t really telling the full truth. What we mean when we say that is simply that creation is iteration and that we need to give ourselves the room to try things that might not work in the pursuit of something that will. Wrong turns are part of every journey. They are, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, dancing lessons from God, and the last thing we want to do is give our kids two left feet.

The fourth section has an organizational bent to it, specifically the organization of a maker’s work space. I believe every shop is a physical manifestation of a maker’s philosophy on how to work. And by understanding that philosophy, you can fine-tune your methods, your habits, and your builds.

In the end, Every Tool’s a Hammer is an eclectic mix of story and instruction, which suits me. Eclecticism is kind of my brand. I’m a generalist in my creative output and a wannabe polymath in how I organize my life, so it’s only fitting that for every cautionary tale and story of triumph, there is a lesson on the tools, techniques, and materials that have defined my life as a maker. Frankly, I thought there would be more of the latter, but the deeper I got into the writing, the more wary I became of speaking from a position of authority because my talent lies not in my mastery of individual skills, at which I’m almost universally mediocre, but rather in the combination of those skills into a toolbox of problem solving that serves me in every area of my life. It’s important to mention that this toolbox includes a wide roster of incredible, inspiring makers and creators, whom I was lucky enough to consult during the writing of this book. Their honest and engaging discussion of their approach to their craft, kept inspiring me as I worked on this project and I hope it contributes toward inspiring you, too. Reading about making always makes my hands itch to make something myself. If this book has anything like that effect on you, I’ll feel like I’ve done my job.

So let’s get making.

I

. Yes, that was his actual title.

1

DIG THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF THE RABBIT HOLE

How do I get started? Across four decades of making, I have been asked this one question more often than any other. It’s a simple question on its face, with not so simple answers underneath. At an individual project level, my answer is usually Well, it depends, in large part because creation and making have their own particular dynamics that involve unique concerns with the mental physics of inertia, momentum, structural cohesion, friction, and fracture. Thus, the rules of what you’re making often determine how you begin.

Most of the time, however, the question really being asked is, How do I get started when I have no idea what to make? That’s when the question moves from the physical world of making to the internal, mental space of ideation and inspiration. I have come to believe that the answer to this question resides within one of the grander, fundamental principles of physics, the first law of thermodynamics: an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Which is to say, to get started you need to become the outside force that starts the (mental and physical) ball rolling, which overcomes the inertia of inaction and indecision, and begins the development of real creative momentum.

With my personal proclivity for speed and experimentation, I rarely have an issue getting moving, and rarely have difficulty coming up with ideas as a result. With eyes that have always been bigger than my stomach, my creative plate has been consistently full to overflowing with ideas. My battle is usually with time and resources more than worrying about what my next project will be.

I know this might make me unique in some maker circles, and probably infuriating to others, but I assure you that this has less to do with any special skill on my part and more to do with one specific trait: obsession. In my experience, bringing anything into the world requires at least a small helping of obsession. Obsession is the gravity of making. It moves things, it binds them together, and gives them structure. Passion (the good side of obsession) can create great things (like ideas), but if it becomes too singular a fixation (the bad side of obsession), it can be a destructive force. As a maker, which result you experience depends largely on how you discover, engage with, and manage the sources of your obsessions.

I am a serially curious person. Countless things have captured my attention over the years: history, science fiction, film, the architecture of public spaces, mechanical computers, glue, LEGOs, curse words, magic, storytelling, Star Wars, physics, philosophy, armor and weaponry, magic and monsters, new tools, tiny cars, space suits and spaceflight, animal consciousness, eggs. I’ve not found an end to the list of things that have sent me deep down various rabbit holes for exploration. Thankfully, I had early support from parents who cosigned many of these flights of fancy and encouraged my natural interests. My dad was an artist and my mom was a psychotherapist. I lucked out there. If I was curious about something, they gave me permission to explore it. When I didn’t know how, they made the tools of exploration available to me. At one level, I think that what my parents were trying to do was to keep my curiosity aimed at something constructive, something other than mischief, though I was certainly able to engage in a fair amount of that in my time. In the house I grew up in, my folks put real value on following one’s passionate interests wherever they might lead. They knew that if I would let those feelings be my guide, I would be more likely to do something with the fruits of that exploration.

Emotional self-awareness is a tall task for a kid. Hell, it’s tough when you’re an adult. It’s hard to put words to emotions. It’s even more difficult when verbalizing them in public might subject you to scorn. That was certainly the case for me. The pubescent teen me had no earthly idea how to describe what Star Wars or science fiction or the Apollo astronauts made me feel. At least not in a way that I wasn’t sure would get me stuffed into a locker. So I kept my enthusiasms and feelings to myself. This is a strategy that is not unique to young, enthusiastic, creative types. Where I differed was that in keeping my feelings secret, I did not also bottle them up and extinguish them, as so often can be the case when you don’t have a supportive environment at home. Instead, I simply let them multiply inside me until they were all that I could think about.

In this sense, what my parents had really done by nurturing my curiosity was to give the original green light to my creative obsessions, and I will be eternally grateful to them for that. Their encouragement demonstrated to me that my budding obsession was a thing of value, not a trifling thing to be dismissed; my fascinations were worth something; my curiosity was currency to be spent in the service of deep exploration, both of the external world and also of myself. They gave me license to pursue what I have called my secret thrills.

FOLLOW YOUR SECRET THRILLS

Secret thrills can come from anywhere and anything at any time. If you happen to be a cinephile or an architecture fan like me, it might be the MacGuffin that pushes your favorite movie’s plot forward, or it could be the verdigris patina of some weathered architectural detail on a building you pass every day on your way to work or to school. If you’re paying attention, those types of things will catch your eye, and if you let them, they’ll start to engage your mind. Once in a while they will even thrill you enough within the privacy of your own imagination to feed a desire to go deeper into that thing, to know more about it, possibly even to possess and do something with it. Budding (and matured) obsessions like these are where ideas come from.

In my experience, when you follow that secret thrill, ideas pop out from the woodwork and shake out of the trees as the gravity of your interest pulls you farther down the rabbit hole. And yet, so few of us give that thrill much purchase. We may even dismiss it as an indulgence or a distraction. There is almost a quiet shame in it, which is a big part of the reason why that secret thrill always seems to remain secret for so many. Over the years, I have lost count of the times people have come up to me and begun a conversation by quietly, almost reluctantly, admitting to their own curiosity about something I’ve done or a hobby I pursue. There is a belief among many of these types, that to jump with both feet into something like that is to play hooky from the tangible, important details of life. But I would argue—and have—that these pursuits are the important parts of life. They are so much more than hobbies. They are passions. They have purpose. And I have learned to pay genuine respect to putting our energy in places like that, places that can serve us, and give us joy.

I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been able to follow my secret thrills into adulthood and then into professional success. But even if I hadn’t been able to do that for a living, if I could only chase those thrills in my free time, I would still be constantly making stuff.

This stands in stark contrast to other fleeting interests and random skills that I used to pursue, like juggling or dramatic performance, which I gave up on once I got a notch better than mediocre. With so many of those early fascinations, I never knew how to push past that point of proficiency, and I didn’t care enough to find out. I was the Patron Saint of Mediocrity+1.

When I realized in my early twenties that I could pursue, and maybe catch, real excellence at a high level of making, that is when I dove in headfirst. And that pursuit has radically improved my ability to incorporate the skills I already had with new skills I hoped to acquire. It’s also made me more comfortable with acknowledging the limits, which are substantial, of what I can do. For instance, I would love to be a writer of screenplays. A screenwriter’s way of seeing is a special thing. They have a unique type of brain, one that filters the world it experiences entirely through narrative and has, over time, become a highly tuned machine in the service of character construction, world building, and plot layering. Screenwriters are