Ownership and Mastery

The video below is of my 14-year-old grandson. For the last several weekends, he and I have worked together to turn a pile of miscellaneous detached parts into a running go-kart. This is the moment we first fired it up and let it rip.

I suggested to him a few months ago that we do this project, and I confess I was completely riddled with ulterior motives. Besides merely wanting to hang out with him, I wanted him to gain experience working with hand tools. I wanted him to feel the exhilaration of working on something for an extended period of time, needing to learn entirely new concepts to succeed, and then to have the exhilaration of success after working on something hard. I wanted him to learn a little bit about mechanics. And I wanted to amplify his already noticeable attraction to embodied work. I wanted to stoke the fire of excitement and deep satisfaction that emerges when, having applied newly acquired knowledge, things finally begin to work as you originally imagined. That first time he pressed on the throttle and the torque converter really engaged and started turning the rear axle…well…it was a magical moment for both of us.

But something else happened along the way that came as a bit of a surprise. As the project progressed, my grandson came to his own realization that, since he was developing an intimate familiarity with the way the go-kart actually worked, he would not be at the mercy of anyone else to maintain it.

Two things happened during the first trial run that you see in the video above. The throttle cable shook loose, and we discovered there were real adjustments needed to the brakes. He came by earlier today and made the necessary fixes and adjustments, and he tested them out entirely on his own.

This insight about the liberating benefits of his newly acquired self-sufficiency kept surfacing in our conversation. The reduced dependence that would come from having acquired his own knowledge and skills was the thing he kept bringing up.

What he ended up discovering was a taste of the personal freedom - the liberating agency - that comes from acquiring the kind of competence which produces technical mastery over one of his own possessions. Thus, by the end, he was most enamored with how his new skills and knowledge amplified his own independence.

And I love that. I hope he never forgets it. My own grandfather would be proud.