making a way
Making a way is about figuring out how all the pieces can come together to make something valuable. It’s an iterative process filled with trial and error, but in the end you will have enabled a new and valuable approach to doing or producing something.
Following a way is about replication — you don’t have to figure out how anything comes together, you merely need to do as the way-maker did to be a beneficiary of the their labor and learnings.
The ways we make are valuable at the beginning, but they also have a temporal problem: a way-maker can only account for their current knowledge of the world. The more knowledge that is generated, the more the world changes, the more at risk current ways are of becoming obsolete.
The Yellow Pages, photo albums, and travel agents — ways of managing things that are important to us — were all useful until, in time, they weren’t.
Embracing all that there is to love about the world demands that we make ways of doing things widely available, advancing possibilities for flourishing demands that we routinely become way-makers.
