A few years ago I tried to build an electronic nose.
Not a metaphor. An actual machine that could smell.
It had sensors that picked up tiny amounts of stuff in the air. The idea was you could point it at a thing and it would tell you what was in there. Smoke. Rotting food. A gas leak. A specific perfume. A specific person, even, if their body chemistry was unique enough.
It didn't work great. The sensors were finicky. The data was messy. Half the parts I ordered showed up wrong. The software for reading the signals was a nightmare. I spent months on it. Eventually I shelved it.
A normal person would say I wasted my time. That months are gone and I have nothing to show for it.
I don't see it that way at all. I learned more in those months than in years of regular work. I built things on the side of that project that I still use. The shelf where the nose sits next to my other half-finished things is not a graveyard. It's a library.
This post is about why.
What "weird things" actually means
When I say weird things, I mean projects that don't have a clear business case at the start. Things that don't have a market. Things nobody asked for. Things that might work or might not. Things that sit at the edge of what's possible with the tools I have access to.
Some of my weird things over the years:
A robot designed to fold laundry. Most of what it could do was push laundry around in interesting ways. Folding remained beyond it.
A drone with a camera that was supposed to find lost things in tall grass. It found exactly one lost thing in tall grass. A frisbee. We knew it was there. We were testing.
A device that monitors power use in an RV down to the watt, so you can see what's burning electricity in real time and yell at the family member who left the AC on.
A smart yellow camera that was supposed to be a kind of friendly security guard for the front porch. Mostly it took pictures of mailmen.
A custom system for tracking creator economics across multiple platforms so independent artists could see the whole picture of where their money came from.
A bus. An actual bus. Converted into a mobile recording and broadcasting studio so we could go to where the music was instead of asking the music to come to us.
You're allowed to laugh at any of these. I laugh at some of them too.
But every single one of them taught me something I couldn't have learned by reading about it.
Why this isn't a waste
Here's the part most people miss when they see somebody building weird things.
The point of the project is not the project.
If you're a normal builder building a normal product, your goal is the product. The product ships, you make money, you move on. Success is the product working in the world.
If you're building a weird thing, your goal is the build itself. The product working would be nice. But the actual value is in your head when you're done. The skills, the questions, the dead ends, the surprise discoveries, the new way of seeing.
Every weird project teaches you something the universe wasn't going to teach you any other way.
The electronic nose taught me how chemical sensors work. How to read tiny analog signals through a lot of noise. How human smell actually works, which is way stranger than most people know. How to think about smell as data. None of that was the goal. All of it stayed with me.
The laundry robot taught me that movement in three dimensions is harder than it looks. That fabric is a nightmare for machines because it has no fixed shape. That the human brain solves problems every day that the best engineering teams in the world can't crack. I have a new respect for the act of folding a shirt.
The bus taught me about generators. About internet at speed. About what people actually want from a live show. About how rigging audio in a moving vehicle is a different problem than rigging audio in a building. About diesel maintenance. About insurance for things insurance companies have never heard of before.
None of these skills were the goal. All of them came home with me.
The myth of the lone genius
There's this image of the inventor as a single person in a garage who has one big idea, builds it, and changes the world. Edison. Tesla. Jobs in the early days.
That image is mostly wrong. But the part of it that's right is the garage.
What the famous inventors had in common wasn't genius. Lots of people are smart. What they had in common was they spent enormous amounts of time around physical things that didn't work yet. They were soaked in the textures of broken stuff. They knew what a circuit smelled like when it was about to fry. They knew what a motor sounded like when it was almost dead. They had calluses from materials that pushed back.
That soaking time is what built the intuition. The intuition is what let them spot the breakthrough when it appeared.
You can't read your way to that. You can't watch your way to that. You can't podcast your way to that. You have to build broken stuff for a long time. You have to fail at things in a hundred different physical ways. You have to handle the materials until your hands know them before your brain does.
A weird project gives you that soaking time. The reason it's "weird" is that it doesn't have to make sense to anybody else. You're not pitching it. You're not selling it. You're just doing it because something in your gut said "what if?"
That "what if" is more important than people think. That's the engine.
What weird projects do for your brain
Three things, and they all stack.
First, they show you the actual world. Most adult life happens inside a system somebody else built. You drive on roads. You use software. You shop in stores. You eat from menus. The system has been smoothed over so you don't have to think about how it works. A weird project takes you under the hood. Suddenly you're dealing with the real physical world. Voltage. Friction. Pressure. Heat. Light. Sound. Time. You have to deal with the world as it actually is, not as the user-friendly interface presents it.
That changes you. You start to see infrastructure everywhere. You notice why the door is shaped the way it is. You notice the angle of the kitchen counter. You notice how a stranger is solving a problem on the side of the road. You become a person who sees how things are made, instead of a person who only sees the made thing.
Second, they make you smarter at your day job. This sounds backwards, but I'll explain.
When you spend time on a project nobody is paying you for, you make decisions for reasons other than money. You make them for elegance. For curiosity. For the joy of solving something. You build a habit of asking "is this the right way?" instead of "is this the cheap way?"
Then you go back to your day job. You have new tools. You have new intuitions. You have a slightly different brain than you had before. The weird project pays for itself in the day job, twice over, even if the project itself never ships.
I've seen this happen so many times I can't dismiss it. Every period of my life where I was building weird stuff on the side was a period of my career where I was sharper at the main thing.
Third, and this is the big one, they make you a more interesting person.
I don't mean interesting in a performative way. I don't mean for the resume. I mean genuinely interesting. The kind of person who notices things. Who has stories. Who can have a real conversation about how the world is put together. Who has opinions formed by experience instead of borrowed from social media.
That kind of person is rare and getting rarer. Most modern adults can talk fluently about three things: their job, the show they watched last night, and whatever's happening in politics. That's a narrow life. People who build weird things have a fourth thing, and a fifth, and a sixth. They have lived inside many small worlds. That makes them better company. That makes them better friends. That makes them better thinkers.
Why now is a weirdly perfect time
This is the part that makes me want to grab people by the shoulders.
We are alive in the best era in human history to build weird things.
The tools have collapsed in price. A 3D printer costs less than a TV. A laser cutter that would have been a small factory's prize possession thirty years ago now lives in someone's garage. Circuit boards can be designed on a free program and printed in China for ten dollars. AI can write code, design parts, generate art, simulate physics, draft documents, and answer questions about almost any field, for the price of a coffee a day.
A person sitting in their basement today has access to capabilities that would have required a hundred-person company in 1995. A thousand-person company in 1965. A nation in 1865.
That's not an exaggeration. That's the math.
And almost nobody is using it.
Most people use these world-changing tools to scroll. To watch shows. To shop. To consume. The same tools that could let them build a small empire of weird things are sitting in their hand making them slightly dumber every day.
You don't have to be a genius. You don't need money. You don't need a degree. You need curiosity, time, and the willingness to embarrass yourself by building things badly until you build them less badly.
That is the entire recipe.
What I tell people who say they're not creative
A lot of people tell me they wish they could build things but they're not creative.
I think that's a story they've been told for so long they believe it.
Creativity is not a personality trait you're born with. Creativity is what happens when somebody with normal curiosity makes a long enough series of choices about what to make. The choices add up to a style. The style looks like creativity to anyone watching. But the inside of the experience is just one decision after another, most of them small.
If you don't think you're creative, you've probably never given yourself a chance to find out. You've never picked a weird project and stuck with it long enough to make a hundred small decisions in a row. You don't know what you'd come up with by decision sixty.
Most people quit by decision eight. They tried, it was hard, it looked dumb, they put it down. That's not "not being creative." That's being a beginner who didn't get past the beginner stage.
Stay in. Make the small decisions. The style is on the other side.
The thing to take with you
You don't have to build an electronic nose. You don't have to build a robot. You don't have to build anything I built. Those are my weird things. Yours will be yours.
But pick something. Something with no business case. Something that just bugs you in a curious way. Something nobody is asking for. Something you don't have to defend at a dinner party.
Start it this weekend. Make it badly. Don't show anybody yet. Just build the worst version. Then build a slightly less bad version.
The thing you make is not the prize. The prize is the person you become while making it.
The shelf in my workshop has a lot of half-finished things on it. They look like a graveyard to my friends. To me they look like a record of who I am.
You should have a shelf like that too.
Start filling it.
