What Belongs in Your Toolbox

Think of a physical toolbox: it has limited space, and you can’t pack every single tool inside it. You really want to make sure that whatever is inside the toolbox is something you actually use, something you can rely on, day in and day out. You don’t need to throw everything into your toolbox—that just makes it heavy, cluttered, and tough to find what you need.

Your creative toolbox can be just as easy to use as a physical one. Yours will be uniquely suited to you, because your talents and needs are also unique to you.

I don’t expect your toolbox to look exactly like mine, especially as you get farther and farther along your creative journey. I’ve developed my own, but along the way, it helped me to listen to everyone’s advice and try out different things.

But ultimately, you choose what makes the cut.

I’m just sharing a framework to help you get started.

How do you decide what belongs in your toolbox?

I use two methods:

• Discernment, which we’ve already discussed in the last section.

• Experimentation, which I'll talk about below.

Experimentation

When someone (including me) hands you a tool that worked for them, you can try that tool out for yourself. Then after testing the tool out, you determine its usefulness.

Some tools will work for you.

Then you can put it in your toolbox and bring it out when it's needed.

Some tools won’t be useful to you at all.

You can leave it, and take the experience as solid information to draw on when making your future decisions.

Some tools will kind of work for you, but they're not quite right.

That usually means that you need to take part of the almost-right tool use it in an altered way. Then inspired by the idea but adapting it for your needs, you can invent a tool of your own, one that is perfectly tailored to you.

Why would I invent a tool of my own?

That final option is probably the very best method out of all three. There are billions of people on the planet, and each one is unique. Each individual requires a different assortment of tools in their toolbox, and not all of those tools have been invented yet.

No one has all the answers, but I believe everyone has a piece of the answer, not matter what puzzle you are trying to solve. This includes me—and more importantly, it includes you.

If you are inventing your own tools, you might make a piece of the answer to someone else’s puzzle as well as your own. That piece won’t exist in the world unless you trust your own needs and experiment to create a tool that meets them.