Back when I had horses, I needed a hay feeder and couldn’t afford to buy one. So I built one.
It looked pretty ridiculous but it worked good enough. And that was all I needed. Even better though? I got the satisfaction of saying “I had a problem and I figured it out”. And then seeing a thing that I actually made. Myself. With my own two hands.
And I’ve been doing some version of that pretty much my whole life. If I couldn’t afford the tool, I’d find a cheaper way or make one myself. I did it in the analog days and I do it now with digital tools. A lot of what I build starts with seeing something useful, checking the price, and thinking, okay, that’s not in my budget so how much of this can I make myself?
For years I hated that I couldn’t just buy the good tools. And if I’m being honest, I still wish I could afford more of them. But now, I’ve trained myself to better see the benefits I’ve gotten from challenges in my life. So I now realize that all that time I spent working around the limits taught me how to see possibilities that I probably would’ve missed if I could’ve just bought my way past every problem. And somewhere along the way, I started to enjoy the challenge too.
There’s research suggesting that some constraints can help people come up with creative solutions. It depends on the limit and the situation though for sure. I didn’t love not having the money. I do love that I’m confident I can make something work regardless of the constraints put on me.
Having said all that, a few weeks ago, I set three priorities for myself. This week Hank, the AI assistant I’ve been building to help keep my projects organized, reminded me about them when I was about to keep pouring more hours into a project that wasn’t really getting results. Usually I’d try to think of one more thing to try.
So yeah, I’m still the guy who wants to figure everything out. But, I’m also learning that self-imposed limits don’t need to be challenged the same way that external limits do.
From the Workbench
No Easy Choice is paused. September will be the last story and email I publish. I'm gonna keep the site and the old dilemmas up because I put a lot into the idea but the current version of it was just taking up too much of my time and resources for what it was giving me back. I may yet come back to it but for now I'm trying to stick to the priorities that I already chose.
Personal videos are taking shape. I refined my brand kit this week because I want the history stories, experiments, and things I’m building to feel like they’re all coming from me without making them all look the same. But, it’s honestly probably just more procrastination. We’ll see.
What Has My Attention
Ted Lasso. My wife and I caught up on the last two episodes this week. Man, that show is amazing. That’s it. I don’t have a big point to make about it right now. We’ve just been watching it together and I’m enjoying the hell out of it.
Trail Marker
What’s something you’ve made because you couldn’t afford the ready-made version?