CREATIVITY ENGINEERED

When I finished college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I had an opportunity with a friend’s engineering business. I majored in English. The only science and math classes I took were astronomy and a calculus course I nearly failed.

The work rewarded me with decent pay and a lot of frequent flier miles. It also burdened my friends with a grouch who hated his 8 to

5. I didn’t really hate the job, but I disliked it enough to start making fresh decisions about my future.

That future involved writing. I wanted to do cool things and write stories about them. And get paid for it. That’s a career, right?

The funny thing is, the engineering job I disliked taught me how to engineer a career I would love. Through workdays that I felt were devoid of creativity, I was learning the real creative process. And that built a path to Family Handyman.

ENGINEERING = PROBLEM SOLVING

Frank, my engineering manager, loved numbers. A walking calculator, he could figure air changes in a

room faster than I could conjugate a verb in the present tense. Whenever I got stuck, Frank could have solved the problem fast by himself, but instead he’d make me do it. “I can solve the problem, so you can too,” he said to me, frequently. We never left for the day until it was solved.

PROBLEM SOLVING = CREATIVITY

I learned to love tools, and when I left that engineering job in 1992,I discovered Family Handyman. And I bugged the editors until they let me help in the office and shop.

I already knew that problem solving requires a process or a tool (sometimes a reciprocating saw, other times a thesaurus). What struck me was that sometimes you have to make the tool or create the process. Wait, not “have to.” Sometimes you “get to” create it.

That’s the beauty of DIY, of owning a home, of building things, whether a bird house or the ultimate workbench. Keep on engineering, solving problems and creating.