Zero to Maker, 2nd Edition

3 The Maker Mentality

You don’t make it with your hands. You form it with your hands. You make it with your mind.

—Edgar Tolson

Nature or nurture? It wasn’t a question I had really considered when I started out. I never thought that making could be a hardwired trait. Certainly, I’d met and known a number of people who seemed to have a genetic disposition to this stuff—constantly disassembling things, tweaking everything to try to improve it, always busy building something. Those were the quintessential maker traits, of course. But I was still surprised when a reader applied the nature versus nurture question to making. In a blog entry where I discussed my forays into welding, I described a friend who was trying to weld his own grill. In ...