Are you a Craftsman?
Recommend a book (that I haven’t read yet): The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
Well, at time of writing, you have to pre-order on amazon, but these 2 articles gives a pretty good introduction to the book, thanks to Charis’s recommendations.
From Times Online and The New Atlantis.
Drawing it closer to my own daily life, I live by day as a “general worker” and a “consumer” in a capitalistic society where I draw a salary in return of a service that’s marked secret by the government. Although there is still a kind of craft in, say, writing papers, which I’ve yet to master, the audience is appallingly limited to my bosses, as needed. However, I buy stuff off the shelf, and sell away newspapers to karang guni man containing my house mate’s carefully crafted articles, which he had to defend and debate with his editor everyday.
By night, I in turn become a craftsman. I build websites, mostly for free, write music, mostly for free, blog, play the trombone, and cook, which doesn’t make economic sense because the food downstairs is $2.70 (the stupid 菜饭 store raised prices!!) but the cost of getting my kitchen to a state where I can make something beyond instant noodles is staggering, forget the amount of time required to make a good meal.
But similarly, my own crafts, are treated just as commodity by others, especially when it’s given away for free – one of my earlier motivations for charging (thinking maybe people value things they pay for). By Sennett’s argument, that’s actually a misleading sentiment coming from a craftsman, a labourer of love.
Sometimes I joke to others that I’m just a construction worker, give me an MP3, and tomorrow you get a full band score in the blink of an eye. That’s a total misrepresentation of the work involved naturally. If you watch the process of crafting, even as it’s not an original composition, it can be extremely demanding on the soul, imagining audiences reactions to the pieces, thinking about every player who’s going to play every note, the hysterical moments where I just break out singing something I wrote repeatedly to experience the progression etc.
By the same argument, wouldn’t the construction worker who places every brick together to create a HDB pigeon hole feel the same about their creation? It’s not their design, they are just gluing pieces after pieces of predetermined materials together. At the end, he’s not acknowledged, and his craft will not be “felt” unless it crumbles. I held this view until a few Sunday ago when ST ran a Saturday section on construction workers from various countries in Singapore. Posing in front of the HDB structures that they help built, these people actually have “I built this” written all over their face, much like Michelangelo did the ceiling of Sistine Chapel. But all the paper focused on was their future life after they’ve earned enough (e.g. get married la, build house in town in India etc.) which is what our world see us today.
Jumping back to work life: in all the interviews I went for, I explicitly ask about mentors. Will I be shadowing someone? Who will be my immediate boss? Is he someone that I can be an apprentice to? It seems that I cherish my manual craft a lot, but craft is something that can’t be manufactured and bought (e.g. attend a writing class to learn writing will only give you the tools to start experimenting with, not make you a good writer). It has to be created, be shown, be admired even by the creator, even if it doesn’t ring with anyone else.
And at the end of the day, the craftsman would feel like he has given something to mankind, not just completing the job for their supervisors or their customer. We commonly use the phrase “it’s a work of art!” to mean that it’s too complex or unfathomable. But in this case, I can also use it to describe that the work has went beyond its “science”, the cold hard logical working parts of that functional deliverable to serves its purpose and justify its existence, into its “art” or “craft” that is a gift that cannot be measured by the monetary reward or annual performance review the work will be judged by.
And that’s a hallmark of being a craftsman.
End with a quote from Shop Class as Soulcraft:
So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.
