Cogs in the System

I used to think that it was a really bad idea to be a cog in the system. I thought this for two reasons. First, I was personally averse to being a cog in any system, and of course any preference I have is the right one to have. Second, there were a ton of visible examples of people who were cogs in the machine and didn’t really seem to be doing much.

But then last week I was at my friend’s house, and he was watching the Ben Heck show. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a show where a very unfunny nerd makes amazing things by hand. In the episode I saw, Ben was making a soda can crusher powered by a very small motor.

If the motor was just attached directly to a crusher, it wouldn’t do anything to the can. It would move fast, but there wouldn’t be much torque. So he had to make gears– cogs– to take the input of the motor and mold it to the needs of the project. With a series of gears, he adapted the input to go much slower but have enough torque to crush the can.

With different gearing, he could have done the opposite. He could have sacrificed torque and made the gears spin very quickly.

Watching that episode made me respect the cogs in the system, or at least some of them. A million motors spinning in isolation doesn’t do anyone much good, but connecting them to gears allows them to do a lot. Any given contraption may have a lot of gears and only one motor, but that doesn’t mean that the gears aren’t valuable.

If you take a bunch of gears of the same size and link them together, you lose some power to friction, but don’t otherwise gain anything. Those are the cogs in the system we need to avoid becoming. Those are the people shuffling papers around without adding anything, finding their place in the machine without contributing to it.

Be a motor, or be a cog in the system. But make sure you’re actually doing something and not just taking up space.

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Photo is from the Ramen museum in Yokohama, Japan. Really cool little museum!

Heading to Iguazu falls on Sunday. First time in Brazil!