Tools and Curiosities

“Don’t Follow Your Dreams, Follow Your Tools”

The omniscient YouTube algorithm recently resurfaced a Hank Green video on my feed, with that very title.

I think it is more generous than “follow your dreams,” because dreams are often just old pictures of yourself. They are formed from the vocabulary you had at the time. They inherit the prestige objects of the culture around you. They assume the world will keep offering the same destinations it offered when the dream first appeared.

Tools are more honest. They are a current account of what you can do, what you can see, what you care about, who trusts you, what you have learned, and what kinds of problems you keep finding yourself most drawn to.

A toolkit includes the obvious things: technical skills, writing ability, taste in interfaces, knowledge of a domain, the ability to model complex systems in your head. But it also includes the less obvious things: relationships, accumulated scars, values, recurring irritations, the specific kind of friction you notice before other people do.

It includes you.

A tool is not just a thing outside the self. It is any capacity that changes what you can do next.

You see this most clearly when you make something.

Before you know how to build software, many problems remain complaints. A workflow is slow. Some information lives in the wrong place. A person is copying data between systems because nobody has given the work a better shape.

After you know how to build, the same problem looks different. It becomes material. You can see where a script would help, where an interface is missing, where a system boundary is wrong. The world did not change. Your handle on it did.

Learning a tool changes the board.

This is why “follow your tools” is better than it first sounds. It is not saying: only do what you already know how to do. That would be a recipe for stagnation. It is saying: begin from actual contact with your current capacities, then use projects to stretch them.

The usual dream-frame asks: what do I want to become?

The tool-frame asks: given what I can now see and do, what is the next live problem?

That second question is much better.

Curiosity is the pointer

Tools by themselves are inert. They need a search policy.

Curiosity is one of the better ones.

By curiosity I do not mean novelty addiction. I do not mean opening twenty tabs and calling the feeling of motion research. I mean the thing that keeps snagging your attention. The broken workflow you keep complaining about. The question you keep trying to explain to someone else. The topic where the available answers feel fake. The capability that feels newly possible but not yet well-shaped. The area where everyone else seems strangely resigned.

Curiosity usually arrives before a thesis. This is why it is easy to distrust. It does not yet have the dignity of a plan. It is just a tug.

But a tug is information.

A lot of good work starts as an inability to leave something alone. You notice a gap. You notice that people are using clumsy language for a real thing. You notice that a system works, but only because some human is absorbing the mess in their head. You notice that everyone is arguing about the wrong part of the problem.

At that stage, the job is not to write the grand plan. It is to build enough contact with the problem that the next question becomes sharper.

Curiosity is a pointer. It is not proof. It has to be tethered.

The tether is a project.

Projects are probes

A project is curiosity made concrete.

You do not need the full plan. In fact, if you already know exactly what the thing will become, the project is probably less interesting. The project is where the plan earns detail.

The point of a project is not only to produce the artifact. It is to send a probe into reality.

The probe asks:

• Is the problem real?
• Does anyone care?
• Was the hard part technical, social, distributional, aesthetic, or organizational?
• Does my current toolkit transfer?
• What tool am I missing?
• Do I still care after the first burst of interest?
• Can this become useful to someone besides me?

A serious project should leave behind at least one of three things: value, taste, or tools.

Value means the thing helped someone. Taste means your predictive model improved. You now understand some class of decision better than before. Tools means you acquired a reusable capacity: a library, a pattern, a contact, a distribution surface, a sharper concept, a scar.

This is why failed projects are not always failures. Some projects fail as products but succeed as probes. They teach you where the hard part really was. They reveal that the market did not care, or that the interface was wrong, or that the technical problem was easy and the coordination problem was the whole game. They show you that your toolkit was missing something.

Then you learn the missing thing.

And that new tool changes what projects are available next.

This loop is much more useful than the dream-frame. The dream-frame treats deviation as distraction. The tool-frame treats deviation as exploration, as long as it makes contact with reality.

That last clause matters.

It is very easy to fake this loop. You can start projects that never leave your private world. You can collect beginnings. You can confuse the feeling of expanded possibility with the reality of expanded capacity. You can stay in the pleasant phase where the project is still mostly a story about who you might become.

Shipping is what closes the loop.

Not always shipping as in a polished public launch. Sometimes the right unit is a prototype shown to one user, a script used by a teammate, a memo that changes a decision, a small tool that saves someone ten minutes every week. But there has to be some surface where the world can answer back.

You can improve something bad. You cannot improve nothing.

Work with gravity

There is a kind of work that feels like falling downhill.

This is not the same as easy work. It is work where your tools, values, interests, and energy are already arranged in the direction of the problem.

Ambitious people are trained to be suspicious of this. If it feels easy, surely it cannot count. Work is supposed to feel like swimming upstream. The difficulty becomes part of the proof.

Sometimes that is right. Some important work is hard because the problem is hard. Some obligations have to be met whether or not they feel alive. Some stretches of any real project are just unpleasant.

But some work is hard because it is badly matched to your tools. Or because it is mostly prestige. Or because you are trying to become a person you once imagined instead of looking at the person, toolkit, and world that actually exist now.

There is no virtue in that kind of difficulty.

Working with gravity is what it feels like when your tools, taste, curiosity, and the problem all point in roughly the same direction. You still work. Sometimes you work a lot. But the work carries you forward instead of asking you to constantly manufacture motion.

The test is whether the downhill path compounds or merely soothes.

A compounding downhill path leaves you with stronger tools, sharper taste, more useful artifacts, better relationships, or better problems. A soothing downhill path leaves you with the same self, just better entertained.

This is the guardrail. “Do what you want” is not enough. Wants are noisy. Some wants are signals. Some are avoidance. The difference is contact with reality.

If the work keeps making the world answer back, trust the pull more.

Usefulness disciplines curiosity

One of the best ways to keep curiosity honest is to aim it at something useful.

Useful does not have to mean profitable. It does not have to mean large. It means there is a counterparty. Someone has a problem. Someone can use the thing, reject it, misunderstand it, depend on it, ask for it again, or tell you it did not matter.

Other people’s problems resist your story about the project.

This is why tools are such good projects. A tool has to meet another mind at the interface. It has to be legible enough to use. It has to encode some opinion about the work. If the opinion is wrong, the user will feel it quickly.

A useful tool also creates leverage beyond the original act of making it. It lets someone else move. It removes you from the loop, or at least reduces the number of times you have to personally carry the same context across the same gap.

This is one reason composability matters. A good tool solves a case and creates an affordance. It becomes part of someone else’s toolkit. They can combine it with capacities you did not predict, in situations you did not design for.

Hamming has a line that the essence of science is cumulative. You should do your work so others can build on top of it. This is true outside science too. A project becomes more valuable when it is not only an answer, but a surface for future work.

Useful tools are a way of making curiosity cumulative.

The toolkit compounds

The visible output of a project is the artifact. The durable output is often the toolkit that remains after the artifact succeeds or fails.

This is why small projects can matter more than they look. They plant acorns. You learn a domain. You meet a collaborator. You acquire a distribution channel. You develop a reusable pattern. You get one painful lesson about what users actually do. You write one script that becomes the seed of a system. You learn that the elegant part was irrelevant and the boring part was load-bearing.

Then the next project starts from a different place.

This is the loop:

1. Tools let you see or do something.
2. Curiosity points you at a live edge.
3. A project creates contact with reality.
4. Reality contact expands the toolkit.
5. The expanded toolkit reveals better curiosities.

This may feel a bit scary. It does not give you the comfort of a fixed destination. It asks you to keep moving while the map is changing.

But this is how a lot of real careers seem to work. With the compounding of tools and judgment across projects.

The particular thing you do may involve luck. That you keep becoming the kind of person who can do interesting things is less luck.

But you still need an arena.

An arena can be a user, a production system, a deadline, or a peer whose taste you respect. What matters is that the work has a surface where being wrong costs something and being right changes what happens next.

Without that surface, the loop can collapse inward. Curiosity becomes stimulation. Tools become accumulation. Projects become beginnings.

Better maps

I do not think the alternative to dreams is cynicism.

The alternative is attention.

Pay attention to what you can do. Pay attention to what keeps pulling on you. Pay attention to the problems that become visible only because of the tools you already have. Pay attention to where the world pushes back. Build something small enough to touch reality and serious enough to change your tools.

Dreams can still be useful. They reveal values. They tell you something about what you once found beautiful or urgent. But they should not be allowed to harden into old maps.

The better aim is to keep producing better maps.

Follow your tools. Follow your curiosities. Take on projects before you fully know how they will work. Let them teach you. Let some of them fail. But make them real enough that the world can answer.

Don’t follow your dreams into a picture of who you used to want to be.

Follow your tools and curiosities into an arena where the work can change what you are capable of seeing next.