A Mason's Work

[00:00] One of the most profound ways to really grow and develop as a person, and this sounds probably
[00:08] crazy to some of you, is to make something.
[00:12] When I say make something, I mean literally physical objects in the world.
[00:16] Anything from woodworking craft to paper cards to 3D printing to making a recipe or a food
[00:27] that you're not familiar with.
[00:28] In the process of creating things, and we talked yesterday a little bit about just pursuing
[00:34] discomfort, making things has a relatively low risk threshold.
[00:39] The worst you're going to get is something that looks awful or tastes bad or whatever.
[00:45] And so the risk reward kind of thing is low.
[00:49] The reward you get on the upside of making something you've never made before, or trying
[00:55] to make something you've never made before, let's put it that way, is you may not have
[01:01] the transcendent moment.
[01:03] You may not find at the other side of this the full, like deeper self-expression that you're
[01:11] going to get from taking on bigger risks.
[01:12] But in the grand scheme of things, making something could put your feet on the path to those kinds
[01:20] of experiences.
[01:21] So what do you get in the process of making stuff?
[01:25] Particularly stuff like food where improvisation is good, or a kind of an overall design but
[01:34] without specific schematics, where you have the guidelines but not the exact measurements.
[01:41] What you do when you make stuff is you essentially create a series of problems, which again sounds
[01:49] awful, but it's really quite amazing.
[01:51] Because you are put in this situation to create little problems that you then have to figure out
[01:59] how to solve.
[02:00] And they are in a very narrow context window, meaning the problems that you're creating,
[02:06] we'll use cooking again because it's easier, this food is too spicy, or too soft, or too hard,
[02:13] or too sweet, or too salty.
[02:16] Any of those kinds of problems that you create have to be solved in the context of the build,
[02:24] right?
[02:24] You're not going to solve the too sweet problem of a pastry by adding more protein, for example.
[02:33] I mean, you might, but you get the idea, right?
[02:36] It's not going to be...
[02:38] You have to solve the problem kind of in its own context.
[02:41] Same thing with woodworking.
[02:43] You're not...
[02:44] All the memes are going through my head right now of all the things, the places where people
[02:48] have replaced wood with ramen.
[02:49] But in the context of woodworking, you're not really going to solve problems too far
[02:56] sort of out of scope of the way the problem was created.
[03:01] And in that way, you're going to cultivate, again, a little bit of a problem-solving capacity
[03:07] by virtue of the problems you create in the creation process, right?
[03:12] You're going to try to create this thing.
[03:15] You're going to make these little problems come up that you need to solve, and you can
[03:19] only solve them in those design constraints.
[03:23] And what you'll learn a couple things in that process, apart from whether or not you can solve
[03:29] those problems or you have the things you need or the resources or toolkit available to you,
[03:33] is you're going to also learn that there are some solutions to problems that you never would
[03:42] have considered to start with.
[03:46] That the problem-solving process is its own form of discovery.
[03:52] That you will continue to mature and evolve through a solution until you get to one that's
[03:59] kind of the right answer, for lack of a better way to say it.
[04:02] And then you'll start with that right answer next time.
[04:06] You won't iterate, be as likely to iterate through a bunch of solutions.
[04:11] You'll just start with the thing that worked last time.
[04:14] And as you, again, continue to do these explorations, this process of making things, you're going to
[04:20] continue to develop your own set of like, oh, yeah, this is the best way to solve this,
[04:25] or this is the best solution for this.
[04:27] Oh, this is too creamy.
[04:29] Then I need to add this or that or the other thing.
[04:31] You're going to build a capacity as you create stuff that gives you more agility in the long
[04:41] term, more capacity in the long term to then better solve problems.
[04:46] And that problem-solving capacity for as odd as it sounds will also translate across domains.
[04:52] So your ability to, for example, solve a problem in cooking may not seem like it translates to a
[05:00] problem, say, fishing or something else.
[05:03] But you'll note in the design, the solution design of cooking, for example, that you might
[05:10] add a new ingredient, but it takes a little bit of time for that ingredient to take effect
[05:14] to really, you know, blend into the dish.
[05:17] You may then take that.
[05:19] Well, I've just tried this solution.
[05:21] Maybe I should give it more time when I'm out fishing.
[05:24] Maybe it takes a little bit of time to blend into the fishing solution, whatever that might
[05:29] be.
[05:29] You're going to find that this problem-solving capacity, when you start making stuff on a
[05:35] regular basis, increases, becomes cross-functional and enhances your ability to solve problems
[05:41] that you didn't create.
[05:42] The stuff that life kind of tosses at you and you're like, congratulations, now you've got
[05:46] to deal with this.
[05:47] Well, now you've got a good approach that you learned from cooking or you learned from
[05:51] woodworking or you learned from paper craft or any of the kinds of creation that you've
[05:56] taken on that you can then take that problem-solving approach, bring it to the novel solution,
[06:02] you know, bring it to the novel situation you're experiencing and get better outcomes as a result.
[06:06] Have a good one.
[06:07] I don't know.
[06:07] Alright.
[06:07] Thank you.
[06:15] Mr.
[06:18] Thanks, Mr.
[06:22] I'll let you in.
[06:27] O