“There’s a tool for that.” I can’t tell you how many times I heard my Dad say that. And in the oddity of life, no matter what task we had to do there was a tool for it; not just some tool but a specific tool. Someone, somewhere, at some time had faced whatever challenge we were facing and had designed a tool to get it done with a fair amount of ease and a significantly reduced amount of frustration and stress. The fact that “there was a tool for that” regardless of what I was doing told me that there were some pretty creative people out there, and that I wasn’t the first one to face whatever challenge I was facing.
For a kid, I didn’t really want to take the time to look for a specific tool. It seemed much more expedient to simply grab something a whole lot more common, like a wrench or a hammer or a screwdriver or a saw and force it to work. I also found out that there’s nothing like power tools because they can rip and tear and screw and unscrew faster than you can imagine. You use that kind of power and you don’t really need that specific tool because that stuff will blow through the job one way or another. So who needs the right tool?
As you might imagine, two things would typically happen. Either I’d get the job done, but not nearly as fast or clean or professional as it might have gotten done if I’d had the patience to get the right tool. Or I’d totally blow the job and destroy a bunch of things along the way, leaving me wondering what my aversion to getting the right tool was all about. The fact that “there’s a tool for that” can be wonderful if you find it and use it, or it can be completely frustrating if you ignore it and blow through a job to the destruction of the job.
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Dads Workbench
There's a Tool for That