Frake This! Idea Sex for Dames

When I was riding and traveling to horse shows, space in the trailer was everything, and so was time. Every stall had to be cleaned, and you needed two tools to do it: a rake and a muck fork.

So I married them.

One end was a metal leaf rake, the other a muck fork. The heads were offset, just like a river kayak paddle, so you could smoothly flip it and switch back and forth, which made stall cleaning faster and more efficient. It saved space in the trailer, too. I called it the frake.

I had prototypes that worked well. But the frake never went to mass production, because I didn’t have the time to invest in it. I got so busy with HOOFiTZ® that it went on the back burner.

I’m telling you about it anyway, because it taught me the most useful idea I know.

Idea sex

The author James Altucher, who wrote Choose Yourself, has a name for what I did with that rake and that fork. He calls it idea sex: you take two ideas that already exist and mate them to make a third.

Some of the best inventions aren’t new at all. The pencil with an eraser on the end. The clock radio. Two old things that finally met.

HOOFiTZ® was idea sex, too: an animal print sole on a human boot. That one I did take to market, and eventually to Amazon.

Here’s what took me most of my life to understand. It works on people, too.

The pieces

Actress. Championship rider. Horse trainer. Kayak guide. Model. Roofer. Steelworker. Cocktail server. Eighteen years representing myself in a custody battle. Turbine broker. Inventor. Waitress. Author.

Read that list and it looks like chaos. It looks like a woman who couldn’t decide what she wanted to be.

Let me show you two of the pieces.

A commercial flat roof in Los Angeles. Hot black tar. The heat on that roof was worse than hell, for sure, and the stench of the tar was everywhere. Black goo everywhere, eventually on me, my clothes and my hair. I remember scrubbing my skin red to get it off.

Then steel. I was certified to drive the machines: the forklift, the narrow aisle reach truck (lovingly called the “Star Wars”), the picker. We took down and put up cantilever columns, uprights, decking, drilling and anchoring, all of it. Crazy. And the jobs were overnight only. I called it the upside down world, like in Stranger Things. Your circadian rhythms get so off you don’t know what day or time it is. It really takes a toll on you, and it takes a while to readjust to real, daytime living. It was rough.

What did the roof and the steel give me? Grit. Another perspective, from a different kind of job. And the confidence to move cantilever steel with a forklift, which is not normally considered “a woman’s job.” That empowers a woman to do all jobs.

More pieces: I took my art classes knowledge and married it to my executive temp jobs experience and built businesses. The best thing I got out of high school was learning to type. It has served me well. We are living in one of the most incredible opportunity-filled times in history.

That’s not chaos. That’s inventory.

Reinvention is the frake

Reinvention isn’t becoming someone new. It’s the frake: idea sex, applied to a life. You take the pieces you already have and mate them into something that has never existed before. Something only you could build, because nobody else has your particular pile of pieces.

Your first act was mostly chosen for you. By necessity, by family, by the bills, by who needed you.

Your second act is the first one you get to choose.

And you’re not too late for it. Economists from MIT, Northwestern and the U.S. Census Bureau studied American start-ups and found that the average founder of the fastest-growing new companies wasn’t twenty-five. It was forty-five. A fifty-year-old founder was nearly twice as likely to build one of those companies as a thirty-year-old. (Source: Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda, “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” American Economic Review: Insights, 2020)

The woman you were isn’t gone. She’s your inventory.

If you have a computer—or even just a cell phone—the ways to create income are almost endless. Some may surprise you, and a few might make you wonder why you haven’t tried them already (I’ll be revealing some of the best ones in an upcoming post. Stay tuned.).

This week’s thought experiment

Take some time throughout the week to ponder every version of yourself you’ve ever been. Every job, every role, paid or unpaid. What does each one know that nobody taught her in a classroom? Or write it down, if it helps.

Then pick two that don’t belong together. The more unlikely, the better. The caregiver and the bartender. The accountant and the gardener. The roofer and the rider. Put them in the same room and ask what the two of them could build that neither could build alone.

Don’t dismiss whatever comes, even if it sounds ridiculous. A rake married to a muck fork sounds ridiculous too, right up until it cleans a stall.

What could only you build, out of everything you’ve been?

— Dame Eileen

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