The Maker Generation
I recently decided to quit my corporate job at a company I admire to start something I’ve always wanted to do but never felt like it was quite the right moment: learning how to code. I am not following a fad, I’m just following a passion that started when I was a kid. I had the first Lego Mindstorms set and built my first robot when I was around 13, I built my first website when I was 7/8 thanks to a primary school teacher that was quite into the rise of the internet (that was 1995!), I built my second website for a Math/Physics class project about speakers and sound waves (you can have a look at it here. Don’t hurt your eyes 😀). I always loved to build rockets, submarines, boats, and fake geysers.
Knowing this, it seemed that my natural orientation would have been to become an engineer. Unfortunately, my poor math results didn’t let me get in a French engineering school. Instead, I went to college (yes in France engineering schools and college are usually separated), and studied Economics. Not necessarily the wrong path as I learnt a lot about the Human Behavior, Marketing, Statistics, and Probabilities. Because I was still in love with New Technologies I ended up at Withings, a French IoT company in Paris. After 3 years doing many things from general Marketing to Digital Marketing, I recently decided that it was time for me to start to get my hands dirty. Not being brilliant at Math is no more a barrier to entry, it’s getting easier and easier to build things. In April, I will start Le Wagon for a 2-month full-stack web development boot camp in Paris.
And I am not the only one! Millions of people are starting to realise that building stuff is so rewarding. Building things that people love is even more rewarding! Lisa Welmarz, my fiancée, also decided to quit her job to start a new adventure. She’s going to become a Barista after having worked for a tech company. Sooner or later she’ll open her own café because making people happy is her goal. Of course, when you work for a company, you indirectly make some people happy but it’s hard to visualise it. It’s hard to collect all the rewards.
Our generation is lucky enough to have thousands of tools and opportunities to start building their own things. It gets easier and easier to learn things that used to be extremely complicated and reserved to experts (coding, hardware, marketing, mechanics, etc.). Today you can learn basically anything at no cost if you’re disciplined and motivated. Recently, Sarah Marga and I built a service called Happenstance. It’s pretty simple, we just connect you once a month to another Human Being from anywhere in the world. It took us about 1.5 months to build it. Impossible to build it so fast a few years ago. We even got into Product Hunt top 10 Hunts!
I see more and more people choosing the hardest, but most rewarding path, of building things with their own hands. Our generation is becoming more and more creative because we don’t have to be as technical as in the past. Designers can now launch a multi-billion dollars company (Airbnb), and an Economist (me) can put a website together in a week. Creativity is becoming the added value nowadays because being as technical as before is not necessary anymore and it’ll be even truer in the future. I highly advice you to read this article by Dustin Timbrook: Want Your Children to Survive the Future? Send Them to Art School.
Whatever you’re passionate about, use your own hands to build this passion. You don’t have to quit your job if you don’t feel like it, having a side project can be just as rewarding as dedicating your entire time to it. Love motorbikes? Why don’t you buy an old one and start to rebuild it? Love bikes? Get an old speed bike and transform it into a single speed? Love space? Learn the basics of aerodynamics by building your own rocket model? Do you love good food? Buy some tools and ingredients, and cook one great meal every week. At one point you might become so good that people around you will push you to open your own Restaurant! I guess you get it now.
Go out there, build something.
