The material — it is the origin of all things. The essence before form, the silence before music, the fertile void from which ideas emerge.
Not long ago, I came across an article that did more than inform — it reshaped the way I think about creation. Its message, both gentle and firm, was simple:
"Don’t revere planning over doing. Craft’s truth emerges only through the friction of material engagement."
That sentence landed with weight.
Jonny Gios on Unsplash
So often, when we set out to build something, we forget that we are not engineers of the ready-made, but artisans of the invisible. We are not assembling pre-cut parts — we are reaching into the unknown and trying to extract a shape. An idea, in its first state, is never a finished product. It is raw ore — silent, heavy, and inert. It demands attention, patience, and pain.
And yet, in our rush for results, we try to force this matter into usefulness. We expect it to function, to perform, to scale. But material does not yield so easily. It must be fired, bent, broken even, before it becomes. An idea follows the same law. It must be tested. Beaten. Tempered by contradiction and contact. Refined through confrontation with the world and with others.
Working the material means acknowledging that you don't yet know what it is you're holding. It means letting it rub against different thoughts, different perspectives, different hands. It means questioning its shape, its weight, its role in the greater whole. Is it a critical piece, or just a shimmering distraction?
To be a true artisan is to return to the forge. To wrap your hands in the heat, to lay your thought on the anvil and strike. Not mindlessly, but with care — listening to its echoes, watching how it resists or bends. You are not crafting a bolt. You are shaping a mechanism that requires time, and distance.
All our lives we've been taught to make knives: take the metal, flatten it, sharpen it, make it cut. But what if this metal could be more? A spring, a lock, a lever? Why confine it to the shapes we know when it longs to become something else entirely?
This is just as true in business as it is in art. Before execution, there must be reverence. Before code, curiosity. Before launch, transformation. You must give the idea space to GROW, stretch, and evolve — until it becomes not only viable, but vital.
Creation is not imitation. It is not applying a formula. It is, above all, daring to be different. And it is through difference — through friction, failure, and fire — that the most extraordinary things have been forged.