Making is a way of working that has three parts. They are working within the boundaries of your community, the limitations of our resources and to the best of your momentary skill. These are three constraints that both limit and make possible making and learning.
First, your community is made up of cultural and biological factors, people relations and social connections. Here you find both support and resistance. People know you as you are not as what you want to become. They often have an interest in you staying static. Watch out. Some of your community will mentor you past your own expectations. Watch for them.
Second, your resource limitations determine what is made, not its value. It takes lemons to make lemonade. Some of us have lots of wood or metal or food or fabric available to us. These raw materials are the building blocks of a maker. Finding them and learning all we can about the materiality of available materials is part of making.
Lastly, the skills you possess now. The stuff we make at first is not as good as our aspirations. Our aspirations are what drove us to make stuff and the stuff we make fails to meet our aspirations at first. Don’t give up. As you make, you learn and develop new skills and can apply them in future projects. The important thing is to make a bunch of stuff. Over and over. Skill develops slowly. Real slowly sometimes.
Reading and loving Steven Pressfield’s “Do the Work”. Short and pithy. About resistance and the lizard brain. The problem isn’t that we talk to ourselves in usually a negative and hurtful way. No, the problem is that we listen. Everyone goes around with this voice trying to get its way. This is natural. We think this voice is a true reflection of reality and who we are. Not so. It is just a voice trying to be important and get its way. We consider this voice to be us thinking. If that is the case then the adage of “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” is a appropriate one. But thinking is quieter then the voice. Thinking as a creative, connective process needs quietude. To think creatively we want the incessantly noisy and not so positive voice in our heads to be quiet and let bubble up from that space that is what connects us to what is actually happening in our environment. Investing time in quieting the voice is time well spent.