Leveraged Making
When I was a kid, I spent much of my time making video games. Then I devoted my early teenaged afternoons to making an app for making art for video games. Now I make tools which can (among other things) help make apps for making art for video games.
My goals have shifted away from games over the years, but I still consider the same metaphor that excited me in eighth grade: that of leverage. It’s a useful principle no matter one’s goal, so I’d like to share a few examples.
Say you want the world to have amazing teddy bears. You could make them yourself, but you couldn’t make enough for everyone! If you spent your time teaching people how to make especially wonderful teddy bears—and if you did a very good job—the world might have more amazing teddy bears in the end. Your effort is effectively magnified, leveraged. You might also amplify your work by researching extra-fluffy stuffing and selling the results to teddy bear manufacturers.
So, no more video games: now the point of my work is to expand the reach of human knowledge. Computers and software are outrageously useful implements for that end. We’ve got a world of knowledge at our fingertips, along with the tools to explore, share, and expand it. Those tools give us leverage over knowledge. An hour at a library can become seconds with software like Wolfram|Alpha.
Presently, I make tools for making tools. On the occasional days when I do something that radically improves the quality and ease of creation of all these levers, the effect compounds into fantastically broad reach.
I’ve long mused that a teacher could have much greater leverage over the reach of human knowledge: after all, he trains the people who could go on to make tools for making tools for creating knowledge! Among all the other wonderful things his students might do.
In the last couple years, though, I’ve enjoyed considering the principle taken one step further: what if I created tools which allowed teachers everywhere to be radically more effective and efficient? Or which helped students teach themselves far more easily? Leverage abounds.