The Gear Doesn’t Matter

In 2018 a friend invited me to watch a movie called Free Solo. We walked out of the theater with the same reaction as everyone else — stunned that we had just watched a human scale the sheer face of El Capitan with no gear. No harnesses, no fancy tech. Just a guy. 

In rock climbing, the concept of ‘free soloing’ means you might fall and die. No gear means big problems. So it’s not surprising that people on the r/climbing subreddit think a lot about the gear they use (and that part of the subreddit’s description is we are scared of falling). 

But most hobbies are not like rock climbing. In most hobbies, the gear doesn’t matter that much. My guess is that it makes <10% of an impact on whether or not you can do the thing. You, the person doing the thing, are actually the changemaker.

• In tennis, the difference between the racket Roger Federer uses and a $30 racket from your local sporting store makes <10% of the difference at the amateur level. 
  

• In fly fishing you could buy a $3,000 rod, but it will give you a <10% improvement in your capability to catch fish over a $30 rod from Amazon. This is true at all levels.
  

• In piano, if you are a beginner, a $30,000 Steinway will only give you a <10% advantage over a $30 used piano on Facebook Marketplace.
  

And yet if you go to the subreddits for any of these hobbies, you will see thousands of threads debating the minutia between the 2016 and 2017 model of a specific tennis racket, or the factory in which some fancy fly rod was made. If what you care about is just doing the thing, these details do not matter all that much. You matter more. 

A 0.1-gram weight balancing issue in a tennis racket is insignificant compared to you just training more. [1] A fancier fly rod may feel better to cast, but it won’t (usually) catch you more fish. A nicer piano might sound better, but you are the one playing. The gear doesn’t matter.

This is important to remember, because sometimes the gear can be intimidating. People will tell you that you can’t do something without a certain piece of gear. That if you don’t optimize every single piece of your gear, you’re not doing it right. Or you’re not enjoying it right. Or you’re not excelling as much as you could be. It doesn’t matter that the average person obsessing about tennis racket metrics online would not be able to win a single point against Rafael Nadal, not even if Nadal used a $2 racket from Temu. Some people just really, really care about the gear. [0]

But the gear doesn’t matter. You matter. So just do the thing. Get better at it. Keep practicing it. Get the gear if you want. But remember that it’s you, not the thing you spent $500 on, that matters.

[0] It’s totally fine to care about gear. You might not guess it, but I care about gear. I like playing tennis with a nice racket. But it doesn’t fundamentally transform my ability to play tennis. It just feels nicer. You don’t have to have the racket.

[1] It’s surprising how many times in my life I’ve walked up to a tennis court (or driven to a river) to see a complete beginner with thousands of dollars of gear. And it’s funny, because the gear makes no difference. They’re going to be terrible at it. They could be using a tree branch instead of that $2,000 fly rod and they would catch the same amount of fish. That’s part of the point of this essay.