Author: metatools_etjwys

Over the past hundred years many major shifts have happened – primary among them the transition to the information/digital age with the attendant increase in mobility of capital, humanity, and information. Along with this has come a dramatic proliferation of tools.

A hundred years ago, in 1920, the tools an average person had access to could be considered in an afternoon, perused in a hardware shop or a few catalogs. Today there exist tools unimaginable back then – cell phones that can translate languages instantly while carrying thousands of books worth of information, websites that allow people to hire others for hundreds of different tasks (from transcription to design to app development), and 3D printers (delivered next-day from Amazon) that can create any components you like. If you’d rather not buy your own 3D printer, there are services that will print parts for you, in a wide range of materials.

Finally, there exist wholly new types of information, services, and experiences to unlock human potential itself. People like Tim Ferris and Tony Robbins have devoted themselves to sharing transformative information, techniques, and mindsets. Platforms like Udemy, Coursea, and Khan Academy democratize learning, empowering millions. Psychotherapy has advanced dramatically and is easier to access than ever before, with new services to help people find therapists. Ancient and novel arcane knowledge is in the open, and creativity–fostering tools are more widely available than ever (including the Oblique Strategies card decks – both physical and digital.) I could list dozens of other examples (and will on this site, categorized.) For example, crowdfunding is an extraordinary tool, so is cloud computing, blockchain, etc. etc.

This website is devoted to the idea that with this proliferation comes a new challenge – collecting, categorizing, and making accessible the wide range of tools. We’re all born knowing of none of these tools, and it’s easy to go through life not grasping the full power of the tools that are available (especially as they evolve rapidly.) I intend for this site to eventually include social submission and categorization, but for now it’s the work of one idiosyncratic person and any submissions that readers share. I will give a special focus to “meta-tools” that foster awareness of and fluency with other tools – one example and inspiration is the website Cool Tools, another is the book Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. Tim’s book is filled with the techniques and strategies that help the world’s top performers succeed. I consider that book a meta-tool (tools that unlocks other tools, by increasing awareness of, access to, and fluency with other tools.) I hope this website will become a powerful meta-tool, a dynamic resource for learning about tools and meta-tools.

The dictionary definition of tool is too narrow – an alternate definition I find useful is ‘any construct that allows one to achieve their aims.’ That is an overly broad definition, which could encompass everything from a wrench to a house to a glass of wine. However, it is useful in that it allows us to see the power of metatools. If tools are what give us power as humans, metatools magnify that power by increasing awareness of, access to, and fluency with those tools. The concept of metatools can even be an investment thesis – which companies most effectively increase awareness of, access to, and fluency with more powerful tools? For a company, awareness of = good marketing, access to = good distribution, fluency with = customer success, and more powerful tools = good product. Posed this way, the concept of metatools also becomes a corporate strategy statement – how may we as an organization etc. etc. 

In the definition of tools as ‘anything that allows one to achieve their aims,’ what could ‘anything’ be? I believe they can be grouped into the following categories:

• Physical – a wrench, a car, a crane, a mobile phone, a fiber optic cable, a data center (check what it’s called)
• Mental – affirmations, personal strategies, religious beliefs
• Computational – software, algorithms, computational tooling, programming languages, operating systems, internet protocols
• Relational – an organization, a church, an intentional community
• Legal – a corporate structure, the concept of tax-advantaged carried interest, or a type of contract

(This is likely an incomplete list, I would love thoughts from readers on other categories they’d suggest.) 

Many tools are hybrids that encompass multiple of these categories:

• A church is a tool for living a better life, being closer/more in alignment with ones higher power, aiding those you see as kin, etc etc. it includes a legal structure, often a building, a set of teachings/ideas, artifacts/designs, and in the case of Scientology even (dubious) proprietary electronic devices. [auditing device]
• A corporation is a complex tool, shaped and directed to serve the ends of its many stakeholders (employees, insiders, founders, board of directors, activist investors, government agencies, the public and the media, customers, etc etc) A corporation can include all the tool types above – it exists as a mental construct drawn around a legal structure, a constantly shifting set of employees, capital equipment, intellectual property, communications in and out of the world, values, beliefs and strategies, etc. etc.

We should not lose our capacity to be astonished at the extraordinary increase in the power of tools easily available to us. The iPhone is unimaginably powerful by the standards of just 20 years ago, with natural language processing, vast storage, high quality photography and video, long battery life, high speed internet, maps of the whole world, etc. etc. The genius of the iPhone is also the apps available which greatly magnify its power. This is all so well known and seems obvious, but we must not forget how far we’ve come. Once you’ve considered that, consider next what tools we might have in another 20 years, projecting from that rate of progress (or even further, along the exponential of Moore’s Law.) Vast fortunes have been made (Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon, etc.) by leveraging the power of mobile devices, and this power will continue to increase at an exponential rate (although perhaps in the form of a new device, leapfrogged out of the mobile phone paradigm at some point soon, just as in the period 2007 to 2012 we leapfrogged from the computer to the mobile device for a large proportion of activities.)