Some objects in your life teach you things over time. For me, two of them are the multitools that have shown up across many years of practical use: Leathermans and Swiss Army Knives. I have used one or the other in countless situations. Fixing something at home. Opening a stubborn package. Handling a small repair on a road trip. Making a camping weekend smoother by not needing to walk back to the car for one specific tool.

I have used a Swiss Army Knife since I was a child. The Leatherman entered my rotation later, when the kinds of things I needed to handle started calling for pliers and wire cutters, not just a blade and a corkscrew.

I do not carry one all the time. Many of the places I go in New York do not allow them, including the subway and many office buildings. The realistic version of the story is not constant carry. It is that I keep these tools where they are useful, and I have one with me when I am headed somewhere I might use it.

This essay is not really about gear. It is about what well-made tools teach you, slowly, about how you want to move through the world.

The test of a good tool is that you forget it is there

Most things you buy, you notice. New shoes pinch. A new phone takes a week to feel natural. Even a good chair announces itself when you sit down.

A well-made multitool sits in a drawer or a bag without demanding your attention until the moment something needs to be tightened, cut, or pried. You reach for it without thinking, it does the job, and it goes back where it lives. That quiet competence is the sign of good design. Not that the tool is impressive. That it disappears until it is needed, and then it appears.

Different tools for different situations

The Swiss Army Knife and the Leatherman are not interchangeable, even though they look similar from a distance. The Swiss Army Knife is light, elegant, and built around the blade and a set of small precise tools: scissors, corkscrew, tweezers, the little file. It earns its place when you want compact and reliable.

The Leatherman lives at the heavier end of the same spectrum. The pliers do real work. The wire cutters cut wire. The screwdrivers turn screws under torque. It earns its place when something needs to be assembled, repaired, or pried apart.

Neither one is appropriate everywhere. Airports do not allow either in carry-on luggage, and many cities and venues have their own restrictions on what you can have in your pocket. The pragmatic answer is to keep these tools where they are useful: at home, in the car, in a camping pack, on a workbench, in a project bag for a friend’s home repair day.

Preparedness is a quiet form of respect

There is a particular kind of person who shows up to a situation with what is needed. Not in a performative way. They just have it. The friend who has band-aids in her purse. The coworker who carries an extra phone charger. The neighbor who shows up to help you move with his own moving blankets.

Owning the right tools and having them where you need them puts you in that category. Not by accident, not by personality, but by small decisions made over time about what to keep and where to keep it. The good kitchen knife in the drawer. The screwdriver set in the closet. The Leatherman in the car. The Swiss Army Knife in the camping pack.

I came to recognize this preparedness as a small daily kindness. You are saying to the people around you: I thought about this. I would rather have what you might need than not have it. The cost is low. The benefit is that the people around you feel slightly more taken care of.

What well-made things teach you

A good multitool survives because of how it is made. Stainless steel. Tight tolerances. Tools that lock open so they do not fold on your fingers. A real warranty that the manufacturer actually honors.

When you use a tool like that over years, you start to understand what well-made means in a way that no description can teach you. Things that are well-made do their job without complaining. They do not surprise you. They do not degrade in ways you did not expect. When they finally fail, they fail in a predictable place, and the manufacturer can fix that place because they thought about it when they designed the thing.

I have spent my career building software systems. The same principles apply, almost line for line. The engineering systems that age well are the ones designed by people who imagined what would happen when the system was deeply in use, not just on day one. Tight tolerances. Predictable failure modes. A real warranty, which in software means a team that owns the thing and fixes it when it breaks.

A multitool in your hand is a small reminder of what good engineering looks like in physical form. Every time you unfold the pliers and they snap into position with no slop, you can think: somebody designed that detent, somebody tuned the spring, somebody cared enough about the user opening it on a Tuesday afternoon to make sure it felt right.

The discipline of keeping only what you use

Owning these tools has also taught me what not to accumulate.

There is a whole world of EDC (everyday carry) culture online, and it is easy to get sucked into a pattern of accumulating gear. A flashlight, a pen, a knife, a multitool, a wallet, a notebook, a battery pack, a key organizer, a tactical pouch to hold it all. People photograph their daily loadouts and post them like still lifes.

I find this charming, but my own kit has drifted in the opposite direction. The few things I keep in regular rotation earn their place by getting used most days, or by being so useful in the rare cases when nothing else would substitute. A multitool comes along when I am headed somewhere I might use it. The rest of the time it stays where it lives, ready for the next time it is needed.

That discipline (keep only what you actually use) is the same discipline I apply to teams, codebases, and product surface area. Most of what we accumulate is noise. The things worth keeping are the things that earn their place.

What you keep tells you what you value

If you asked me why I have used these tools across my life, the surface answer is that I like being practical, like well-made gadgets, like being ready in case something needs fixing. Those answers are true but partial.

The deeper answer is that I value being useful. I value well-made things that quietly do their job. I value being the person who has what is needed without making a show of it. I value knowing the difference between gear you collect and gear you actually use.

There is a quieter lesson underneath those. The objects you live with shape you. You become a slightly different person because of what is in your kitchen drawer, the same way you become a different person because of the books on your shelf or the people you sit with at lunch. The tool is not the cause of who I have become. It is more like a steady companion that keeps reminding me what kind of person I am trying to be. Useful. Prepared without being anxious about it. More interested in solving the small problem in front of me than in being seen solving it.

A friend once said to me, after I had quietly fixed a broken cabinet hinge at his place during a holiday dinner, that I always seem to have what people need. He meant it as a compliment. I have thought about it often since. Having what people need is not a personality trait. It is the result of small decisions repeated reliably. What you keep in your toolkit is one of those decisions. So is what you put in your calendar, what you put in your inbox triage rules, what you put on your team’s roadmap. The pattern is the same at every scale.

If I had to compress what these tools have taught me into one line, it would be this: be the person who has what is needed, when the moment comes, and let your work speak for itself. Everything else really is decoration.