Empty Mental Toolboxes
Chapter 7: The tools of fools
Dear friends,
This week’s chapter of User Zero is about tools. No, nothing digital, no software recommendations, no AI hype today. Just good old-fashioned, beautiful, basic, analog, hand tools. We admire people who can fix broken objects and build things from scratch. If you don’t identify as “handy,” then twisting screwdrivers and swinging hammers looks like a physical event. But the real power is the mental exercise that’s happening inside the skull of these world-changers. So let’s see if we can get inside the brain of a “handy” person and look around. What will we discover?
Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade
“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” — Buckminster Fuller
“All done,” Ben claimed.
Apparently my face held hints of the horror I was trying to suppress as I looked at the pipes protruding from my house at odd angles. A project that should have taken a couple hours had collapsed like a crushed can. I never thought it was possible to physically feel the pain of pipes, but for two days I was tortured as Ben inflicted more abuse on that copper than any sprinkler system should ever have to endure.
I’ve reflected on this project often. Why did it go so horribly wrong? How could a man with half a century of experience remain so incapable of quality work? Better tools wouldn't have helped save my sprinkler system. In fact, Ben arrived for work with a beautiful truck filled with expensive tools. And yet, the answer is there in the tools, hiding in plain sight. The important thing isn’t the tools themselves, it is the concepts they represent. Get that right and a person can weave quality into their work with even the most primitive of instruments.
Like all products, tools tend to get covered in upgrades and gizmos that help them jump off the shelf and into your shopping cart. The marketing jargon on the packaging interferes with your ability to understand how to use it. This results in two types of attitudes, neither of which is healthy.
The first attitude is intimidation. The perceived learning curve for mastering a new, complex tool prevents you from using it. After you’ve dropped significant cash on a machine you may feel unworthy to helm its controls for fear of damaging it or your project. People who suffer from this attitude can end up with a garage full of great gear that never gets used.
The other attitude is unwarranted confidence. This is the feeling that the tool is so great that it will do the work for you. That’s probably why you purchased the most expensive option on the shelf in the first place. According to the commercials, the tool can practically operate by itself. Your respect for the tool is so high that you go into the project blind to the damage you are about to inflict on your surroundings. After your inevitable accidents, if you aren’t too embarrassed by your mistakes, you may even try to return the tool to the hardware store claiming that the problem was with the tool rather than with the empty toolbox between your ears.
I’ve experience both of these attitudes firsthand, so if you are prone to being intimidated by tools or if you have been burned by over-confidence you aren’t alone. We get hung up on tools, mistaking the abilities of our accessories with the capabilities of our minds. But tools don’t do the work for us, they are extensions of our mind, and without the proper mindset we can have the latest expensive gear but we might as well be banging on pipes with sticks and stones. That’s how my repair man can run a seemingly successful landscaping business despite lacking a grasp of basic principals. And if a professional like Ben doesn’t understand tools, there’s a chance you could use a refresher, too. So indulge me as I explain six of the most basic and essential tools available to us. I’m not going to tell you how to use these tools, everybody knows that. No, I am going to explain, why. And that’s really the most important part. Learn to master the following concepts and your mental toolbox will never be empty.
1. Tape Measure and Level
When you are starting a project, you should evaluate the current variables with accuracy. The range of a tape measure typically goes from 1/16th of an inch to 25 feet. Any bigger and the scope of your project is probably too large. Any smaller and you are wasting time measuring things that won’t make a difference.
While the measuring tape confirms the inner dimensions, a level calibrates the object to its surroundings. Nothing is self-contained, there are always external forces whose gravitational pull require alignment. Get it wrong and you will be stuck with something that meets the technical requirements but forever nags at you because it feels slightly off.
2. Pencil and a Small Notebook
It may seem old-fashioned, but a small book for taking notes is a valuable tool that often gets overlooked. As you take measurements, jot them down. Make a list of the parts you need. Draw a crude sketch of the project, noting the critical points that will require extra care. People get intimidated by drawing, thinking that an ugly sketch reflects poorly on them. But the point of a sketch is not to demonstrate your draftsmanship, it is a way to quickly capture the key parts of your plan. If you can do that with squares and squiggly lines, all the better.
This is the creative phase and it tends to be the most enjoyable part of the work because your mind is free to explore. You solve mysteries. You create castles and cathedrals in your mind, rebuilding and remodeling until your awareness settles on something that might work.
At the end of the project you can use your notebook to cross off your to-dos, double check that you’ve completed all the steps, and perhaps make a note about what you would do differently next time.
3. Screwdrivers and Wrenches
As you get deeper into a project, disassembly is often required. Screws and bolts tend to be under-appreciated because they can feel like obstacles between you and the inner-workings of the machine. As a result they get ripped out and thrown aside. Then when it is time for re-assembly, the wrong screw gets put in the wrong holes, washers are forgotten, and you inevitably have one more hole than you have remaining screws.
Because of their ubiquity, you can forget that screws are extremely precise machines by themselves. The precision of wrenches and screwdrivers are designed to match the precision of nuts and bolts. Someone who shows up to a job without a good set of screwdrivers and wrenches probably won’t respect the tiny parts he will encounter on the job.
Note that I didn’t say “power tools.” An amazing thing about your body is your ability to extend yourself into your tools. (More on this in chapter 17.) When you are working on a screw, you can feel the pressures at the tip of the screwdriver. You sense the elasticity of the metal and the resistance it is experiencing. An electric drill strips you of finesse just as it strips the screws and precise edges of whatever it touches. Master the screwdriver first, then move on to the power tools with caution and a desire to retain the sensitivity of touch you have honed.
4. Hammer and Pliers
As odd as it may sound, the hammer and pliers are inverse versions of each other. Impact and compression are how we move things that require more strength than our hands possess. And what is a tool really, but an extension of your hand, a machine that amplifies your ability to push, pull, and twist objects? They appear to be blunt instruments, but they require surprising dexterity. Swing the hammer too hard or squeeze the pliers with the wrong pressure and you cause damage. The magnification of a clumsy movement will blow holes right through your walls or strip the grip right off your steel.
Unlike when you are working with screwdrivers and wrenches, the hammers and pliers operate outside the realm of precision and delicate pressures. Here you are responsible for the form that the machine takes as you bend and pound the materials in a dance that ends when your mind is satisfied with the shape you have forced into existence.
5. Sharp Blades
There comes a time in every project where you need to make cuts, points of no return, moments of truth where you only have one chance to get it right. These are the situations where you need absolute confidence and sharp blades. The best advice any parent can give his children are the four words, “measure twice, cut once.”
When it is time to cut, there is nothing more energy-draining than a dull blade. You’ve done all the measuring, built enough confidence that you are ready to cut, then you stall because you have to stop everything to sharpen or replace your blade. Often we proceed anyway hoping the dull blade doesn’t become an issue. As a result we end up with rough, inaccurate cuts or perhaps injury. Keep spare blades handy and make it a habit to replace dull blades the moment you recognize them.
6. A Small Toolbox
I was going to leave this as optional but it’s really not. If you respect your tools and the ideas they represent, they will have a permanent home in your toolbox. You will never be caught unprepared. The person who doesn’t have the right tool handy resorts to misusing whatever is nearby, banging on things with rocks, and prying things open with sticks.
Tools are easily misplaced or lost, especially in the rush to leave the worksite. At the end of the project it is important to put your tools back in their cases. Take inventory. Replace the dull blades. Wipe off the grease, mud, blood, and sweat that has accumulated. This ritual may seem unnecessary, but it resets yourself and prepares you for the next project.
Hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, levels, pencils – as primitive as these basic tools are, they hold eternally relevant lessons. Tools evolve but the principles within them persevere. Even something as seemingly complete as the design of the hammer is still evolving today. The hammer in your mind right now is probably the claw hammer, the type with a wooden handle topped with a flat surface for pounding nails and a curved fork for removing nails. You only have to look at the tool section of your hardware store to realize that even the humble hammer, a user interface that has hardened over centuries contains more nuance than you care to fully understand. What started as a rock at the end of a stick gains complexity with each evolution. Today you can pick between dozens of hammer variations, each type is subdivided further by size, material, brand, and more.
As tools become more and more specialized the user manuals get thicker as the knowledge required to master them demands more head space from their users. Eventually the learning curve gets so steep that the average person won’t be willing to invest the effort required to understand them. The percentage of people who can’t hammer a nail increases each year.
Even as our modern toolsets become more and more digital, these concepts are still beneath the surface. Software is not that different from analog building tools. You still need to assess the project before you start working, measure the important elements, and make a loose plan. You need to work on the materials, pushing and pulling until the mechanisms match your intention. You need to work with precision, feeling the surfaces bend to your will. You have to make cuts. These are all activities that happen in your mind first, not in the physical or digital realm.
With a mental toolbox filled with understanding of the principles behind the most basic tools you have everything you need to transform the world. The incredible thing about these primitive tools is that once even a small degree of competence is acquired, they disappear. You aren’t simply twiddling a wrench mindlessly like an aimless grease monkey. No, you are altering the fabric of reality, not with tools—the instruments are inconsequential—but because your mind is connected to the user interface of reality itself, you feel as if you could change the rotation of the Earth with the turn of a single screw.
As the work aligns with your thought patterns, as substance bends to match the shape of your mind, time disappears, too. You become absorbed in your work. The satisfaction that accompanies this type of work is immense.
The illusion that the world is bending to your will is not an illusion at all. You are not holding a tool, you have become the tool. This power changes everything. You cease to be used by the system, you are user zero, an author capable of changing anything your mind encounters.
To make nature useful we need to transform it. This requires a mental leap where we see beyond what is there and imagine a brand new invention. This is where the path of creation drills straight into the opaque. There is no other way. There is nothing in a grain of sand that hints at the silicon semiconductor. A rough diamond is just another rock. The potential of these resources is hidden, existing in our mind rather than the material. As Bucky said, “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it is going to be a butterfly.” To make the leap from a tree branch to the handle of a hammer requires a new idea. Our ability to survive on a hostile planet is possible because of one reason. We are creative. Creativity allows us to transform clay into bricks, forests into lumber, sand into glass, minerals into alloys. Tiny innovations have built upon each other until today when we can transform wind, water, light, and even the atom into electricity. Evolution inevitably pushes technology into the opaque.
When you open your fridge, you are interacting with a technology you will probably never understand. Compared to a hammer, your refrigerator might as well be science fiction. You inherit this marvel of invention with barely a burp of mental effort. You don’t need to understand refrigeration. You don’t need to understand the electrical system that powers the machine. You don’t need to understand insulation, fabrication, carbonation – any of the underlying systems that allow you to enjoy cold water with bubbles in it.
You can live your entire life without ever wondering about the complexity, the miracle that your refrigerator represents. All you need to understand is the pattern you memorized as a child. Pull handle. Open can. Pour into mouth. We interact with our environment without needing to care about the underlying mechanisms. Worst case scenario the refrigerator breaks down. Even then you can outsource the entire inconvenience to Home Depot.
This is the environment we find ourselves today, surrounded by objects so complex that we can’t possibly hope to master them. Almost the entirety of our daily lives involves interactions with interfaces that mask the complexity beneath the surface. The benefits of convenience lead us to have shallower and shallower understandings of everything. The world-shaping curiosity that we had as infants, the trial-and-error fascination we possessed when the world was new and everything was possible, has been replaced by point-and-click shortcuts and an instant-gratification culture that feels so good that we forget, or maybe we don’t even realize, that our existence only touches the candy-coated shell. Next week we will dive deeper into the opaque, into the pixels we push around on screens.