Two kinds of people live in this world: Those who shrug and walk away when faced with a problem that can’t be solved, and those who spring into action with that same problem. For this latter breed, the word “impossible” is their cue to start noodling, tinkering, and most of all, questioning.
These are the world’s inventors, groundbreakers… and entrepreneurs. Whatever the field, industry, or niche, they’re driven to create solutions that have never existed before. And they’re willing to fail to get there.
Myko is one of the few innovators, so please don’t try to tell him something’s impossible. He’ll squint at you as if you’re speaking in an ancient Egyptian dialect. As it happens, Myko’s latest inventions — TailSpin Calibrated Collinear Marking Tools — are literally the first innovations in a category of woodworking tools that hasn’t changed since King Tutankhamun’s rule over 3000 years ago.
Raised by a florist dad and an accountant mom who figured out how to rehab their own dilapidated house by themselves, Myko grew up hearing the word “crazy” a lot. No worries. Along with “impossible,” he’s seen “crazy” proven wrong so many times that he won’t even bother trying to convince you otherwise. Who’s got time for that anyway, when you’re too busy creating your next invention?
The woodworking bug had bitten him as a child when his parents gave him a block of wood and a set of tools for his birthday. They must’ve known that little Myko was a born visionary, and they were right. To this day, the canoe he carved from that block of wood is proudly displayed in his home.
Myko learned early on that working for himself came far more naturally than punching a clock. After three years excelling in — but hating — a university engineering program, he knew he was destined for more independence and creative freedom than any conventional job could offer.
Fascinated with photography, the young man apprenticed at a local photo studio, trading work time for studio time to build his own portfolio. Soon, he was flying on his own, learning from the ground up the highs and lows of freelancing and entrepreneurship.
Whenever Myko encountered problems that his peers said were “unsolvable,” he’d start experimenting and ended up patenting several of his photography inventions. Over his 35+ year career as a professional photographer in Manhattan, he built four photography studios and, firsthand, mastered product development by bringing a product for large-format digital photography to market in 2010. This can-do entrepreneurial spirit has served Myko well, even after he decided several years ago to point his lens toward woodworking.
One thing this born entrepreneur has learned over the years is that without sales income, no one is free to indulge their imagination. Today, a good deal of Myko’s time is spent promoting his woodworking business through practical how-to videos and an active social media campaign. This affords him the time to do what he loves best: Spending time in his wood shop, creating furniture and tools, sketching out ideas, experimenting, and most of all, innovating.
We caught up with Myko recently and learned a lot from him. We think you will too.
Monica: You say you grew up being “encouraged to try.” Who encouraged you not to be afraid of trying new things?
Myko: That would be my parents. We grew up poor, unaware of it, because my parents went out of their way to make sure the basics were always covered.
We didn’t know that the food we were eating was inexpensive. We didn’t understand that other people lived in less crowded conditions in larger houses. You go over to your friend’s house, and it’s bigger. It never felt like we were lacking in anything. The house was full of love and full of people. I shared a very small room with my brother. My sisters shared another room.
Along the way, my parents bought a house that was in horrible condition. Everybody told them they were crazy. My grandmother walked in the door, took one look, told them they were crazy, turned around, and walked out.
My dad was a florist, and my mom was a bookkeeper. With basically no experience, they rebuilt that house while we were living in it. They knew they had to get it done. If a pipe needs replacing, you learn how to replace pipes. Want to change the walls or open up a room? How do you do that? This was all in the age before YouTube, when you couldn’t just go online and get a lesson on how to do anything.
They learned it all as they went, and we watched it happen. When something needed fixing, you tried to fix it. It wasn’t a matter of “you can’t do that,” or “we can’t afford that.” If you wanted it and you were willing to work for it, you could get it done. That’s basically how I grew up.
Monica: How did that way of thinking carry you through to what you’re doing today?
Myko: I went to school for engineering for three years of a five-year program and hated it the whole time. What I enjoyed, and how I made my money, was photography. I was a hobbyist photographer and later got into photographing parties and weddings. I’ve been to about 500 weddings over the years.
Monica: At the age of 10, you received a couple of life-changing gifts: a block of wood and an X-Acto carving set. How did those two gifts change the trajectory of your life?
Myko: It’s kind of funny the way my parents did this. After the birthday cake, the first present they gave me was a lightweight rectangular package. I opened it up, and it was literally a block of wood. I was confused.
Then there was a bigger box. I opened that, and it was the carving set. I went right to work on that block of wood and turned it into the canoe. I still have that canoe in a place of honor in my home. It was the first thing I ever made, and it set me on the road toward making things in wood.
Since that day, the creative process for me has been pretty much continuous. I’ve enjoyed woodworking as a hobby for 47 years now. My woodworking shop is pretty extreme by most standards. I make furniture. I make a lot of stuff.
Monica: Would you say that you always had that creative side? Or did you become more creative as you began to create things out of wood?
Myko: I always had the creative side. I always had the art side. That’s something that I remember my parents and my teachers encouraging because they saw a spark there. As far as the medium of wood, that became the long-term focus. I do a little work with metal. I don’t do much drawing or painting anymore, except for sketches of furniture pieces I want to build. Over the years, wood became my medium of choice, which led directly to the tools I’ve manufactured.
Monica: You grew up learning that hard work could foster an extraordinary imagination and that working with your hands can be very rewarding. The proof is in what you have accomplished, even as a hobby. The amazing things you’ve created have also led to your innovations and inventions.
But coming out of college, you were a commercial photographer. Did you think at that time that you would be doing photography decades later?
Myko: Yes. After three years of hating engineering but doing well at it, I decided to change to a photography major. I was at Saint John’s University. Normally, changing majors after three years isn’t allowed, but they made an exception for me. They created a program for me to earn a physics degree in optics and a BFA in photography.
But then they pulled the rug on that major at some point. When they did that, I left school and began my full-time photography career. I started out assisting photographers in Manhattan, eventually freelancing, and then I grew that into a career.
I photographed 15-20 covers for Newsweek magazine. I worked for MTV and AMC. I worked with Estée Lauder for many years. I did a lot of architectural work. It was all large-format studio and location work.
Monica: What do you like about photography?
Myko: It’s a very creative process. But photography alone wouldn’t hold my interest as much as commercial photography. With commercial photography, you’re creating an image to serve a purpose. You’re creating an image to sell a product or to get people to show up to look at apartments. It could be to promote an event or to document it. The purpose of the images is paramount.
Competing in New York, you have to serve a purpose and create beauty. That’s where the challenge is — creating something that will do the job and still be beautiful — because one without the other means nothing.
Monica: When wood became your canvas, you found that the existing tools couldn’t help you create as effectively as you wished. But rather than wait for something new to come along, you created the tools you needed. What got you to the point where you said, “You know what? I need to create something to fix this problem that I’m having.”
Myko: That actually hearkens back to the photography industry as well, in that the tools for commercial photography are largely created by the person trying to get an image. There’s not always a gizmo available to do what you want. I have a couple of patents in large-format digital photography. Those products are no longer in production because the technology has changed dramatically.
It’s something I’ve always had to do: Figure out a way to create the result I’m imagining with no roadmap to get there. For instance, how do you photograph a spherical object without seeing yourself or the camera in it? I worked out a one-way mirror system, like in the police shows, with a semi-reflective, semi-transparent glass.
Trying to work out the different problems in photography, I developed a very broad skill set, which led to several photographic products and my first patents. That same attitude and approach in the wood shop put me in a position of not just accepting processes as they exist.
I would look at something I wanted to do and research how everybody did it. That way might be effective, but in the back of my mind, I’d think, “This is horrifically difficult. There should be an easier way to do this. How do I make that happen?”
That led me down the road toward these tools. They’re probably the seventh iteration of what I’m bringing to market; completely unrecognizable from the first version that I made for myself to solve my own problem. It’s just a refinement process of getting it to work better and better.
Monica: Your product is called a TailSpin tool. What exactly does the TailSpin do?
Myko: It’s a new class of marking tools that I call calibrated collinear marking tools. This category didn’t exist until the TailSpin. My challenge now is explaining its benefits to the people who should be using it.
Imagine you put two rulers down on a table up against each other, and then slide one of them out of the way and draw a line with a pencil. Then, without moving that one, put the other ruler back next to it, take the first one away, and draw another line. What you end up with is two parallel lines.
The reason there are two parallel lines is that the marking implement, in this case a pencil, has thickness and a radius. It’s writing outside of that ruler. What I’ve done with my tools is create an undercut offset in the marking surfaces, so that if you take two of my tools and do the same thing, you get a single line. That gives you the unique ability to draw lines around corners and have them line up perfectly. The tools are calibrated to a 0.7 millimeter mechanical pencil, so the offset that’s built into the tools allows you to draw a line.
Monica: What industries can benefit from this tool?
Myko: The woodworking industry has been my primary target. I believe the machinist industry can benefit from it as well. That’s something I’m going to pursue shortly. My patent was published, which enabled me to approach larger companies to license the technology.
That’s something else that creating photographic products gave me — an in-depth education on how to bring a product to market. There are many barriers. Many great ideas never make it to market because there is so much in the way of getting it there. As I like to say, most overnight successes take about 5 to 10 years.
Monica: Some entrepreneurs say, “I don’t have the right tools, so this is not for me.” What can you say to others, regardless of their trade, to inspire them to find solutions to their problems instead of giving up on their dreams?
Myko: If they see a lack of tools as an impediment, then the problem isn’t the tools. People sometimes say, “This camera takes great pictures,” or “This phone takes great pictures.” I always say, “No. You take great pictures. Take credit for the good pictures. Blame the equipment for the bad pictures.”
If somebody says, “I don’t have the right tools. I’m going to give up,” is that because the right tools don’t exist for what you’re attempting? Are you actually trying to do something innovative? Are the tools just expensive, or do you have to figure out another way to access them?
Sometimes breaking past barriers means taking a job. My first studio photography work was in somebody else’s studio, and I needed a studio for my own project. So I traded three or four days of assisting work for one day in the studio. There are ways to reach the tools.
If the tools that exist aren’t working for you, that’s either a matter of educating yourself and building your skill to use those tools to get where you want to go, or, in my case, it’s quite often creating a tool that does what I need to do.
It’s always easy to throw money at something that somebody else has already created. If it doesn’t exist and everybody’s saying, “You can’t do that,” but in your mind, you know that that’s what you want to do, and you should be able to do it, and the results are going to be awesome, then figure out how to do it.
Research the problem that you’re trying to solve for yourself. Maybe it’s a pervasive challenge with others in your field. If everybody is running into the same barrier, then it could be worth pursuing.
I literally solve my own problems, and I can say, “I don’t do it that way anymore. I do it this way.” I often hear, “You can’t do that. That doesn’t exist. It’s impossible.” That’s where I am with these tools. Specifically, the dovetail marking tools. My tagline is, “It’s the first real innovation in hand-cut dovetails since King Tut.” It’s actually true because the techniques used to cut dovetails by hand are the same today as those that were employed on furniture that came out of King Tut’s tomb.
Monica: For those who may not know what a dovetail marker is, can you briefly explain it?
Myko: Dovetails are cut in ratios, which is a scale. They generally range from one to four. Think about a piece of graph paper, with one box over four boxes up. You draw that angle across four boxes and up one. Then there’s one to four, one to six, and one to eight, which are progressively steeper angles. Depending upon the wood you’re working with, one is recommended over the other.
With very soft woods, you need a very steep angle due to the material’s weakness. With very hard woods, you can use a steeper angle, which looks a little prettier. The material’s strength lets you do that. The dovetail marker is a tool that sits on the edge of your board to give you that angle. You mark with either a knife or, in the case of my tools, a 0.7 millimeter pencil. That’s what allows you to mark the angles that you intend to cut. You lay out your joints and mark them on the edges of your boards using a dovetail marker.
Monica: What are some key lessons you apply consistently in your life?
Myko: Keep moving and keep working. I have been self-employed my whole life. The last time I had a job was in high school. Everything I’ve ever done is what you would consider freelance or self-employed.
Self-employment and unemployment are dangerously close to being the same thing. You have to keep working, keep improving, keep going after that next job. I realized early that if you are not in sales, you’re dead in the water, whether as a freelance assistant or trying to get the next advertising or magazine job in photography.
The tipping point for most people who trade skills for money is sales. You do your promotions, push your portfolios around, see a lot of people, and do all the lunches. Then things get busy, and you don’t have time for lunches or phone calls.
You run a rollercoaster. When you’re selling yourself, the money goes up, but the amount of promotion you’re doing goes down. You hit the top of the rollercoaster and realize, “Wow. I don’t have any work.” It’s a continuous cycle. Figuring out how to do sales while you’re working is probably the most effective thing you can do if you want to exist as a self-employed individual.
Monica: What other lessons did you learn to be better at what you do and to be successful?
Myko: Be nice to everybody because everybody else is trying. Take rejection well. Learn from it. Ask why. If you don’t get the job, politely ask why. You’ll get more useful information if you ask questions when you don’t get the job than when you do get the job.
Always ask “Why?” Try to figure out what they rejected. Did they reject me, or was it something I did? Or is their direction simply more suitable for another candidate? I firmly believe that every decision we make, every single day, is the best decision we can make in that moment with the information we have available.
Monica: Would you mind ending the interview with your last word?
Myko: Entrepreneurship is hard. People think being their own boss will give them total freedom, but the reality is that everybody’s your boss. On top of that, selling your services can almost feel like retail work.
But for me, working for myself is worth it all. The beauty is that life is different every day because you’re applying your skills to different people’s needs every day. It’s inspiring to have your talents and your art entrusted to other people’s businesses and crafts.
Earning that trust and holding that trust is what always keeps me going. Trust is gained a drop at a time, and lost in buckets. So if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, keep going, keep learning, be nice, and always work hard to earn people’s trust.