Master of Everything but, Jack of Nothing

I have dyslexia. Most of my projects come out obtuse, backward, upside down, or somewhere between all three. It is okay, though. I learned a long time ago how to think backward. So by the time everyone else sees what I made, it usually looks just fine. That may be the best explanation of my entire life. I have spent nearly sixty years figuring things out from the wrong direction. There was rarely a roadmap. Rarely a mentor. Rarely somebody standing beside me saying, “Here is how you do this.” Most of the time, I learned by doing it wrong first.

I grew up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere Idaho as a latchkey kid in the 80s. My brother and I mostly raised ourselves, with occasional appearances from two adults who assured us they were our parents. It was a different world. There was no internet. There was no YouTube. No person was sitting on the other side of a screen explaining every possible thing you could ever want to know. And there sure as hell was no Google. Well, technically there was. It was a really big number. If you wanted to know something, you had to find it yourself. Encyclopedias, Magazines, Books, Clubs, Friends, Hearsay, Somebody who knew somebody who might know how something worked. And when none of those worked, there was trial and error, a lot of error. Research meant getting your hands dirty. It meant taking something apart and hoping you remembered where all the pieces went. It meant building something, discovering it did not work, figuring out why, and rebuilding it. Sometimes it meant burning something up. Sometimes it meant breaking something that had been perfectly fine before you touched it. But eventually, you learned. That became my education. I would see things in magazines and periodicals and think, “I can make that.” Then I would make it. Then I would look at it and think, “I can make that better.” So I changed it, adjusted it, experimented with it, and found different techniques. Sometimes I created things that, looking back, probably could have become something. But nobody was standing behind me saying, “You should patent that.” There were no mentors in my life telling me that an idea might actually be worth something. Had there been, I might be Iron Man by now.

Instead, I became something else. A collector of knowledge, not necessarily an expert in one thing. More like a person who knows enough about a ridiculous number of things to be dangerous. A master of everything. Jack of nothing.

Electronics, machines, printing, making, repairing, designing, building, experimenting, taking things apart, putting things back together, sometimes correctly. My brain has always worked that way. See something, question it, take it apart, understand it or not, change it, make it better or not. Then move on to the next thing that catches my attention. Some people might call that unfocused. ADHD has another word for it; I call it Tuesday.

Then there is the Navy, then PTSD. Then all the strange baggage we collect along the way and carry around long after the original journey is over. You learn to adapt, you learn to hide certain things. You learn which parts of yourself other people understand and which parts are easier to keep to yourself. You learn humor; sarcasm helps, making things helps, staying busy helps, learning helps. For me, knowledge has always been a kind of survival mechanism. If I understand something, I am less afraid of it. If something is broken, I can study it, and if I can study it, maybe I can fix it. That philosophy has served me pretty well for most of my life. Give me a machine that does not work, and my brain immediately starts running. What changed? What failed? What variable am I missing? What happens if I try this? Give me a process that makes no sense, and I want to understand why everybody keeps doing it that way. Give me a product, and I start wondering how it was made. Then I wonder whether I could make it. Then I wonder whether I could make it better. Which, admittedly, explains why projects surround me. It also explains why I became a maker long before anyone thought to call people like us “makers.” We were just people who made things.

Now there is an entire industry built around it: maker communities, maker groups, maker courses, maker conferences, maker coaches, maker experts, maker masterminds. And, of course, the phrase that apparently became mandatory somewhere along the way: “Join us for Free.” FREE! That is one of my favorite words in modern business. Because it usually means "Free for twenty-four hours." Then the content disappears behind a paywall unless you pull out your credit card. Apparently this has become part of the business model. Get tired of not making enough money making things, so start teaching other people how to make things. Then start a conference. Invite a familiar circle of makers who were probably at the last conference. Tell everyone this one is different. Tell everyone they are about to level up. Cue the comments. “I’m ready to learn!” “I’m ready to grow!” “I’m ready to take my business to the next level!”, and then comes the inevitable: “Oh, by the way, the FREE sessions are only available for twenty four hours. But for just $___, you can get lifetime access.”, every damn time. Could somebody at least be original and give us forty-eight hours? 

The funny thing is, I do not mind people making money; I run a business. I understand that bills do not accept exposure as payment. What bothers me is the disguise. Nothing is ever quite what it claims to be anymore. The free thing is not really free. The secret information is usually not particularly secret. The revolutionary technique is often something people have been doing for thirty years with a new name attached to it. Information that used to be passed from one person to another now seems to come with a checkout button; that part bothers me. I do not believe in gatekeeping knowledge; I leave that to the lawyers. If I figure something out and it can help someone else, I would rather tell them. Maybe that comes from growing up without mentors. Maybe I know what it feels like to wish somebody had taken ten minutes and said, “Here is what I learned. Maybe this will save you some trouble.” Maybe I spent enough of my life figuring things out the hard way that I do not see any glory in forcing the next person to suffer through the same mistakes. Knowledge does not become more valuable because fewer people have it, at least not to me.

Then there is the part of my life that makes all of this suddenly seem very small: my wife, my amazing wife. While I sit here talking about makers, conferences, machines, projects, and a lifetime of figuring things out, she is in a rehabilitation facility trying to learn how to walk again. It hurts my brain even writing that. She inherited polycystic kidney disease from her father, who inherited it from his father before him. A disease moving quietly through generations until it eventually became part of our lives too. Then COVID came, three times. Each time taking something and each time seeming to push her kidney disease farther and faster than it might have gone otherwise. A road that was already difficult became shorter. Then, in 2022, another word entered our vocabulary. Calciphylaxis, A rare disease most people have never heard of, a word I wish I had never needed to learn. Since then, it has whittled away at her health, little by little, piece by piece, strength by strength, normal by normal. Then came the heart attack, and now the woman I love is in rehabilitation, teaching her body how to do something it once did without thought: walk, such a simple word, something most of us never think about. We complain when the parking space is too far from the door. We complain about stairs. We complain because we have to walk across a large store. We never imagine having to learn how to do it again. I have spent my entire life fixing things. That is what makes this so hard. Give me a printer, give me a machine, give me electronics, give me a bad design, give me a failed process, give me a formula that is not behaving the way it should. I will investigate it, I will research it, I will change something, I will test it, I will screw it up, I will change something else, but eventually, I will probably figure it out. That is how my brain works. Problems are puzzles. Broken things are challenges. Failure is information. There is always another variable, another attempt, another solution, except sometimes there is not. I cannot troubleshoot this. I cannot replace the damaged component. I cannot rewrite the code. I cannot fabricate the missing part. I cannot take all the knowledge I have accumulated over nearly sixty years and use it to make my wife healthy again. That may be the hardest thing I have ever had to learn. Sometimes the person you love is fighting something you cannot fight for them. Sometimes knowledge is not enough. Sometimes experience is not enough. Sometimes stubbornness is not enough. Sometimes love itself cannot fix the thing you desperately want fixed. So I am learning something completely different now. I am learning how to stand beside a problem I cannot solve. I am learning how to love somebody through pain I cannot take away. I am learning how to celebrate inches when I want miles. I am learning that progress does not always mean building something bigger, faster, stronger, or better. Sometimes progress is one more step, and right now, one more step means everything. Maybe that is why, after almost sixty years, I am still making things, still experimenting, still asking questions, still researching, still learning things I probably have absolutely no practical reason to know, and still refusing to accept “that is just how it is done” as an explanation. Still sharing what I learn with people who ask. Still trying things backward until they somehow come out right. Somehow, with all those years behind me, all those mistakes, all those lessons, all those projects, all that accumulated knowledge, and a life that has taught me far more than any conference ever could... I just signed up for another beginner's conference for makers. Apparently I’m ready to learn.