Maker

TOOL: The Persistence Enhancer Once you start failing on a regular basis, you’ll learn the value of persistence. If your project is a challenge, you will have problems. It’s unreasonable to expect quick results, ever. If you have to stay up all night, so be it. It might take you a day, week, month, or year to gain the skill(s) to complete something. CONCLUSION: Persist!

AVOIDING UNFRUITFUL FAILURES While failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there’s no reason to invite it into your life with open arms. There are two kinds of failure: meaningful ones, which add more tools to your mental toolbox (see previous), and irritating ones, which threaten to damp your enthusiasm and interest. To prevent the latter flavor of failure, here are a few things you can do:

There is a cultural element to junk collecting. Some relish a yard full of old car parts (that’s me). At the university where I work, we took a field trip to a local industrial surplus store, and one young student from a non-Euro culture was visibly disturbed to see professor, staff, and students gleefully climbing on filthy, wobbly piles of junk (treasure).

Junk collecting is, to me, a discipline; it requires physical and mental effort. Will this (random) thing help me in my project, or am I mesmerized by this shiny bauble’s beauty? Does it fit? Can it be made to fit? Can I adjust my project/path/goal to accommodate it? Does it suit my aesthetics? My politics? Can I afford it? Can I afford to pass it up?

1. Get out of a rut.

Makers are generalists, with a broad range of skills. As a generalist you will find that your skills and brainpower in other areas improve when you learn any new skill.

Doing one task for too long leads to mental fatigue. Also, your brain actually digests experiences after you stop doing them. Those two facts syner-gize. Wrote code for two days straight? Do some gardening! A long day of woodcarving? Do some writing! Achieve balance by practicing extremes. (My most common pairing is software and electronics I work best when my junk is distilled to exquisite vs. automobiles and gardening.) Hanging out with perfection. I have more space than many people, animals is an excellent grounding experience. but hardly infinite; when I bring something home, CONCLUSION: “Specialization is for insects.” something else must go. I have been doing this

—Robert Heinlein for more than 20 years. The result is that nearly none of my junk is, well, junk, at least not to me. Remember what I said about being a dork? CONCLUSION: Good junk is good.

Useless beauty! Who could resist?

Failed brackets and parts: fodder for future projects.

2. Collect a critical mass of junk. The truly wise have deep and rich junk boxes: a fistful of choice tidbits in a shoebox under your bed, or an airplane hangar with kilotons on ceiling-high racks.

3. Seek out the old-school engineers.

Never ask engineers how to build things, unless they are old people. Today’s engineers sit in cubicles and type on keyboards. Old people actually built things, like designed an amplifier, chose the parts, made the cabinet, wired it, and then sat back and listened to it. Today, young engineers will snicker at your harebrained projects.

But engineers are not stupid; it’s just that engineering is not craft. Fordism removed skilled craft from capitalist projects a century ago. Engineers are taught to engineer, not to build.

If you can’t find it, you might as well not have it.

36 Make: Volume 10