Introduction
It was 9pm on a Saturday evening. I was home from college and my elbows were deep into bins that smelled of dust and plastic. I was parsing through containers of old toys, sorting through buckets that hadn’t been touched for a decade, and holding them one last time before giving them away for new children to enjoy. The act felt ceremonial, as if there reaches a point in everyone’s life where they must pass on the instruments that brought them so much joy to others whose memories they will soon have a place in.
My toys held such a close place in my heart. They were where I could visualize my imaginations, bring characters to life and play out fantasies with my little sister, once she was finally old enough to join me, in never-ending stories before our eyes. This is what shaped our childhood playtime. We’d play at our house, beside the pool, in the woods, carry toys with us in the car, bus, even at the restaurant dinner table to distract our grumbling bellies. Our toys were the instruments with which we could fabricate new worlds, and were reflections of how as children, our world was one rooted in discovery, imagination, and the limitlessness of possibility.
I remembered the characteristics of what makes a great toy story: a set of toys, some hierarchy of their civilization (usually we made the fiercest toy the leader), a bad guy, a plot and problem (my favorite were all-out wars between my group of toys and my sister’s), offshoot love stories, heinous monsters to defeat, games the toys would play within the game of the whole thing itself. We created life, stories, universes. This was some of the most fun I’d ever had.
Although a distant memory, the shear power of toys is something I’ve been considering a lot lately. There’s a few underlying laws of toys:
Toys tap into your ability of working with what you have to create something new.
When you play, you pull fantasies from thin air and give them life and meaning for a brief moment in time.
Sharing an imagination, as with my sister and I, brings a rare kind of excitement and bondage.
Kids know how to use the elements before them to build something into existence, internalize a belief around it, and invite others into their playtime fantasies all so effortlessly. They believe in themselves to bring new ideas into the world. It’s such a beautiful thing that I’ve watched become small, hallowed, and silenced in so many people as they grow up in the molds of society. Though there are some who’ve never lost that same kid-at-heart spirit, and it’s them to whom we trust the future of the world.
Building a Toy Project
As a kid, I’d never looked at my toys with an examining eye. But with age comes perspective, with the rush of youth that coursed me in remembering the great adventures of the past, my brain started to kick into idea mode. I thought about the kinds of toys I enjoyed the most, the least, the kinds of storylines that were worth getting lost in for hours on end, and let what ifs fill my head: What if child me could make the toys that I found so inspiring? What kind of toys I would actually create?
The thought brought my to my favorite big-kid game: Minecraft. Minecraft has designed a game that traverses generations. It’s beauty is in its simplicity: a world of cubes, where some cubes can be used to create more cubes which are used to create entire universes. Like the toys, there’s a setting, there’s bad guys, there’s things to be done, and there’s you: the hero. Unlike most video games with clear storylines, though, Minecraft lets you make up whatever plot you want to guide your creative play. It taps into what you’ve practiced in your childhood, it makes profit on ever-expanding imaginations. It does this too with a survivor-like game setting, where your first objectives are to use what you can see in your surroundings to find food and make a shelter. You become a conquistador. The world is your to settle. As a means to do this, you’ll build a house. And that first house you make in Minecraft — you feel extremely proud of it. It becomes your resting place between exploration, an area for you to decorate and add on to, and your home within another realm.
In the real world, growing up and playing with real-life toys, we used various forms of houses, too. Houses that were made of wood, some that looked like barnes, treehouses, others legos that despite their smaller size gave us the flexibility to be compatible with the other lego sets we’d encounter. All of our toy stories had a toy house. Or something like that. Some of them had “caves” — two pillows leaned up against one another to create a dark hallow where the most evil creatures would lurk. Others had “cliffs” — the edge of a nearby table from which the leaders of the clan could look upon their territory. Some even had entire “fields” — our living room rug, which would be scattered with toys more often then tidied up for company. We called all of these places home, my sister and I. Using just our pure imagination, we could construct houses, characters, narratives, and whole civilizations all within the lucid power two minds coming together and giving life to imagination.
With my toys still clutched in my hand, the same way I used to hold them years ago, but with bigger hands this time, I was thinking more about houses, and what we called home for the narratives of the toys we played with. It was then that, with Minecraft adjacently on my mind, I had the idea to build a modular house toy that would combine the maker-ability of Minecraft with the same imagination that real life playing and interaction had to offer. A toy that would be bigger and more versatile that legos: one that would allow kids to build houses, stacking room on top of room, taller than the top of their heads. One where Barbie dolls could live in one room and dinosaurs in another; where you could make a giant mansion, a sprawl of tiny huts, an entire village. One that would allow kids to change and add to it as they pleased, to destroy it when they saw fit, and to have yet another dimension of creating a world that fit the narrative of their imaginations.
I was also working a 9-5 and in a stable state of mind to allow myself to explore side hobbies, so I hit Solidworks. I learned how to 3-D print, and with many trials of tangled plastic, nights of cranking my noise machine to drain the buzzzzing of the printer in my tiny college apartment (my roommates were sweethearts for putting up with it), my idea became a finicky prototype. A school semester and a team of engineers later, my idea became real toys.
These toys are currently in bags around my room. They’re actually quite fun to play with. Seeing them through to becoming a real product has always been at the back of my mind, and perhaps when I return to college this fall I’ll pick them back up again.
What stroke me so deeply, though, was that in unleashing pent up creativity onto this project, I had realized that I still had it. Classes, social society, life, these things had all begun to take precedence over individual creation, and I never made time for exploring inklings of creative thought. Creative thought takes time, it takes effort. And to see an idea through to a state of completion — which I’d argue is the most important thing anyone can do in their young maker career — takes going against the grain to do.
Another realization I had in building these toys, though, cuts quite a bit deeper. I was only about 30 minutes into the project when I recognized my biggest foe in making what I visualized become a reality would be myself. It may sound cliché, but in trying to get my printer to work from 0 experience was the most uncomfortably lonely feeling I’d felt in a while. I felt stupid. I wasn’t used to it. It was a discouraging feeling that made me want to stop the building process to do something I had more of a footing in, and I probably would have stopped, too, if it weren’t for my core belief that what I visualized was entirely possible to create, and I was the one to create it. So, I pushed on, and used the internet as my friend for searching for the answers I needed at every step of the process. I kept one of my old coworker’s words close to me: The internet holds the answer for every engineering challenge you’ll ever face, and it’s your job as the engineer to search every page you can until you find it.
The process took an embarrassingly long amount of time given the few pieces I was able to produce myself, but I did it. Grappling with unknowns and discomfort is something we’re conditioned out of when we grow up, but comes so natural to kids, to whom navigating unknown things is the foundation of life. When we grow up, we often let the kids inside of us go dormant. Those described to be kids-at-heart are those that have identified to never lose this curiosity, tenacity, and perhaps naive belief in themselves that they can create anything they put their mind to.
Building the toys took a healthy amount of un-conditioning from becoming used to having a high bar baseline of knowledge in a field before diving into it. We’re often conditioned to learning in a set of systems in place — the kids inside of us are often eroded away with time, the adulthood we adopt favoring systems over freedom of thought, unanimity over unbounded creativity. Thanks to this silly little project, I realized the looming darkness that had grown within me, a wall in between comfort and discomfort that I’m glad to have broken down.
As humans, we’re programmed to do what the adults are doing. It’s how we learn to become part of the pack. What I fear, though, is that in doing so, most of us forget about the highest part of what it means to be human: that each individual person has the power to bring imaginations to life. Doing so may indeed be the closest thing we have to magic.
You’re a wizard, too
In 2022, I left my Boston college campus to follow my tech-obsessed heart and budding community to San Francisco, the breeding grounds of new ideas and products that will undoubtedly continue to change how people spend their lives. With a fresh eye on tech (“tech” as the abbreviation for the technology-focused society that you’ll find in cities around the country), I wasn’t too surprised to find a culture of glorification of paradigm-shifting founders. Those few that have so artistically mastered creation of experience and culture; of commanding physics to do as they wish and from that sprout new technology that shapes the way the masses conduct their lives — these are the people most respected, quoted, and worshiped. We revere how they’ve utilized such a culmination of skill to create novel things as wizardry. These are the modern magic wielders.
In Harry Potter, wizards born or raised of muggles have no idea they’re anything different than normal humans. At least, they don’t have a clue in knowing so, since any hint of magic is immediately dismissed and ignored until someone tells them otherwise (You’re a wizard, Harry!). Our world is pretty similar to this, except in our world, it’s everyone that possesses hints of wizardry; signs of the present that hint to untapped potential to be explored, which can often be facilitated by someone to guide you in the arts of being a creator.
I believe that this “wizardry” that we all possess is really just the result of learning how to use laws of physics to create new things, and finding confidence in yourself to build apart from what’s already fabricated in society. This last piece — joyfully acting apart from the norm — is something that comes so naturally as a kid without reason’s narrow compass, but gets squandered in adulthood. When the world past elementary school sunk into me that picking a specialty, becoming a working person as my parents had were all in my future and the futures of those around me, I slowly lost touch with such magic. I defined engineering as a median in which you learn skills to practice at a job. Engineering seemed a way for smart people to make the most of their brains and do good work to better society. I chose it as a field of study by this obligation.
What came back to me, so many years later, was that all engineering was was learning how to use what you have to make new things. From a set of building blocks, you can make a castle. From an alphabet, you can write an infinitesimal amount of words, paragraphs, stories, books, histories. From a terminal, you can build the internet.
After completing my first three years of university in mechanical and industrial engineering, I began to gravitate toward software engineering, though my interest in it wasn’t very direct. I was the opposite of one of those geeky coding people; my energy is not derived from solving complex sets, I have no rush of excitement from getting algorithms to run a certain way. I had no interest in computers or the community around them — which, for me as a kid growing up, was stereotypical pale-skinned dorks, no women, and the opposite of the person I aspired to be in relation to my pursuit of social success metrics in middle and high school. It wasn’t until later when I realized that nearly every problem I was interested in — every instance of when I looked at the way something was working and spotted a gap to be filled — the ideas that flooded my mind to fulfill it almost always were software enabled. I got no joy from making Scratch move in a circle, but felt empowered when I later deployed my first website on the internet.
As the world of entrepreneurship will tell you, you don’t need to be an engineer to start a company. You can outsource and bring in more talent to fill your needs, use no-code solutions to test, etc. But what that notion fails to address is twofold: 1) The process of learning how to program will teach you to be a commander of resources, of working with that you have to find what you need, and become a sharp and dangerous learner capable of adapting to any environment, and 2) when you know how to program, something all people are fully capable of learning, you will not only be a visionary, but also a wizard. You’ll wield magic. And you’ll be treated as such. As a true builder, the people around you will respect and awe you for your abilities. You are revered as one who others can rely on to build their future, to solve problems only those with your capabilities can solve, to understand end-to-end why things should be made and how to make them. You buy yourself flexibility, too. As a builder, you can swiftly pivot your creations, changing the features they include with some simple taps of buttons. As a human, you guarantee yourself the optionality to pursue whatever kind of life you want. You can manage, or you can build. You can live anywhere. You will always have income. Engineering unlocks a freedom. It gives you the wings to fly wherever you want, to be whoever you want, and to be respected no matter where you end up.
In a universe where magic, witchcraft, The Force, and other sources of supernatural creation don’t exist, I believe computers are the closest thing we have to limitless power to change our society for the better.
This is simply due to the fact that computers allow us to have a rapidly fast idea-to-product iteration cycle, and one that keeps getting faster with advances in AI allowing us to literally render our imaginations at the click of a button. We’re living in a time similar to when the internet was new again; the new breadth of industrial that AI will unlock for us is uncharted territory waiting to be explored. The conquistadors of it, I believe, will be the ones who treat the pages of Stack Overflow, Geeks for Geeks, and other pockets of online resources as if they’re spell books for casting new incantations of technology. We’re approaching a world where the magnitude of creation will be proportional to imagination. In the real world, adults don’t have play time anymore, but what we do have is the power to turn our thoughts into more than the ephemeral universes of our childhood toy stories.
Conclusion
I finished sorting out the toys in four hours, three hours of which were dedicated to cutting up cardboard boxes and gluing pieces of them together to emulate the cool toy idea I would later develop. I wrapped up the bags of toys and loaded them in the back of our minivan. They had served their purpose for me. They were how I discovered the maker in me, how I re-discovered it as a college kid hungry for side projects, and how I came to realize that visualizing a world and believing in yourself are the keys to creation.
Playing with toys teaches you how to find fun in the act of creation, to find joy in stretching your mind to new places. I want everyone to come to this realization, and never dismiss impossible things just because you can’t see it right in front of you. Computers offer us a magic wand to facilitate this creation, where anything you can think of can be made. They are a boundless representation our thoughts and our medium of displaying our imagination. For when one learns the skills to command the internet, only then can one discover the great toy of humanity we have sitting in our homes that through it the universe beckons.
Never stop the side projects, it's how you will always be inspired your whole life. You won't finish all of them and you shouldn't stress out about them, but they give perspective, joy, and meaning to life