2.7 KiB
Tool Slave
Amateur is obsessed with tools. Master is obsessed with art.
Tool slave is someone who, instead of being focused on creating art, is rather overly focuses on his tools, he is too dependent on his specific tools of choice, has a fanboy mentality about his favorite brand and rarely creates something because he is too busy just configuring his tools and arguing with others. Typical examples are for example the Emacs/Vim fanboys, Unix ricing addicts, GNU/Linux distro fighters etc. Remember that art is the true goal, a tool is only there to help you make it happen -- a good tool is not that over which you masturbate but rather that which you hardly even notice is there, it's in the background and doesn't bother you as you're being focused on creation of your art. If you spend 80 years looking for the right tools to create something and suddenly you find it's too late to put the tools to good use, you have lived your life wrong, you completely wasted all of it by getting ready to do good instead of doing good. Only a reasonable time should be spent on finding a good enough tool, then one must start creating in order to become a master -- a master will transcend his tools and won't even care anymore about which tools he's using -- a mediocre musician will refuse to play music with a cheap instrument, a master will play beautiful music with any instrument you give him. A tool must be slave to you, not vice versa. Tool is not your tamagotchi pet -- once you start to feel emotion, pride or attachment to your tool, something is wrong.
It could possibly even be argued that using a shitty tool could make you better at the art. Everyone can win a race if he is sitting in the fastest car on the track, so sitting in the fastest car won't improve your skill, you don't have to try very much to win. If you instead learn to win races in an average car, your will acquire real skill -- and then if you sit in the fast car you will become a god.
NOTE: a tool however may itself also be a piece of art of course -- the creator of the tool is the artist, but the users of that tool must still treat it only as a tool. The distinction is therefore in the role: the creator of the tool may rightfully be focused on this tool as a fruit of his genius, it is justified for him to spend most of his time on studying the tool and making it so that it can serve others well; the users on the other hand should just take it and in turn use it to create something else.