CHAPTER 8

Make Work a Craft

Luke Pontifell, founder of Thornwillow Press, traces his love of craft to his childhood in a restored eighteenth-century farmhouse in western Massachusetts. From the aged planks and preserved character of his home he learned a reverence for the power of physical things. He loves the history of such places. His mother was a sculptor and his father a writer and advertising executive. And they further taught him creativity and the importance of working with his hands.

Luke discovered the craft that would dominate his life—letterpress printing, papermaking, and book binding—while a student at Harvard College. He took a class on letterpress at the Center for Book Arts in New York City and fell in love. As he learned the art, he wrote famous authors and garnered permission to do special letterpress runs of their books or essays. That first experience peaked when German Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke at his Harvard graduation in 1990. In that speech, Kohl laid out his plan for German reunification and the future of Europe. Luke got Chancellor Kohl’s permission to do an exclusive, limited letterpress edition of his remarks.

After graduation, he joined Mont Blanc, and found himself working out of Germany and visiting a paper mill in the Czech Republic. The owners of the mill told him he couldn’t buy paper, but he could buy the mill. Mont Blanc agreed to be his first customer. And in a stroke of fate, Luke became the world’s largest manufacturer of handmade paper—only to have the factory stolen from him during the tumult of the post-Soviet era. “We lost everything,” Luke says. “Every penny I had invested, I lost. But we sold our home to scrape it all together and started over.”

He and his wife moved back to New York and decided to start a comprehensive business in papermaking and letterpress in the cheapest place they could find convenient to New York City—Newburgh, New York. People told them it would be impossible.

[When we moved to Newburgh], the one thing that we were told by everyone is there’s no way you could do this in America. That you’ll never find the craftspeople with . . . generations of skill. . . . And in some ways that advice was right. In other ways we’ve made it our mission to prove it wrong. And we found very quickly we had to get into the business of teaching and perpetuating these crafts.

With Thornwillow, Luke has two core businesses, the business of making beautiful handmade objects—stationery, business cards, special limited-run letterpress editions of great books—and the business of teaching others his craft. Speaking to him you hear his deep passion for making things that last, things that can matter, things that have, in his words, “soul.”

An object can have a soul when . . . it’s integral to the artistic experience, when it forms a bond between the creator, the author, the composer, and . . . the people on the receiving end. [A]lso when that object becomes like a memorial . . . when it becomes part of your identity.

Luke and his colleagues at Thornwillow have rediscovered that in the age of mass production and disposable items, attention to beauty, detail, trade, and craft can transform the ordinary to the extraordinary. They’ve discovered how craft itself can create meaning.

Craft in a Disposable Age

Have you ever thought about how the very act of pouring yourself into something can give it soul? Until I spoke to Luke, I’d never considered it in those terms. Yet now, I can’t escape the thought that that’s exactly what I respect when I see a job well done. It’s easy to see, of course, in grand masterpieces—the Mona Lisa, the pyramids at Giza, Stonehenge, or Paradise Lost. But in smaller ways, we can all experience the same types of appreciation and meaning in our daily lives—the barista who prepares the perfect cup of coffee or the colleague whose PowerPoint presentations are both functional and beautiful. And most of us have had the transformative experience of really disciplining ourselves to be great at something at work—treating it with the same perfection Luke Pontifell treats each of his editions of The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice. That act of perfecting something, pushing the bounds of human accomplishment, creates meaning.

TABLE 8-1

As opposed to the “task crafting” we learned in the last chapter, making something a craft means deeply investing yourself in the perfection of the activity, becoming the best you can be at it. Craft often results in what we previously learned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow,” a mental state in which you are totally immersed in your work and the world seems to melt away. That state often leads to an enhanced sense of purpose.

Where do you have a sense of craft in your life? If we turn back to our LABORS framework, craft can manifest in either avocations (our hobbies or attempts at self-improvement) or occupation. It often results in beauty—whether the beauty of a well-made shoe to a cobbler or an elegant formula for a mathematician or financial analyst. It’s often a work done in service to others, out of love, or even as an expression of our religious and philosophical beliefs (hence the beauty of so many great religious structures around the world). Yet, many people become so trapped in the doldrums of life they forget the thrill and satisfaction of a job well done, of the act of painstakingly learning a craft and creating works of art from even the simplest of tasks.

Does this sound familiar to you? Have you lost a sense of craft at work? Are you lacking something that allows you to be a creator and get meaning from the discipline of a job perfectly and lovingly executed?

If so, the good news is this is perhaps one of the easiest ways in which to make purpose. Restoring a sense of craft to your life and work is as easy as identifying the opportunities for growth in your profession, assuring you always have an avocation or hobby you can improve on, and learning to see and appreciate the skill of others. Here are a few ways to imbue your life with more craft.

Identify the opportunities for craft in your work

In my younger days as a business analyst at McKinsey, I found a satisfaction building Excel models. I’d never really used Excel until I graduated college, but once I started using it I was hooked. I loved to build incredibly complex models that were simple to use—to craft elegant little formulas and macros that made them interactive and accessible to anyone. I loved picking just the right fonts and colors to make them as visually appealing as they were accurate. I’d literally come home from work, have dinner, and leap into model building for hours, often losing track of time and finding myself up at two or three in the morning.

Maybe Excel models aren’t quite as inspiring as beautiful hand-bound books, a perfectly orchestrated symphony, or even a well-brewed cup of coffee. But to me, they were an opportunity for craft, to transform what could have been mechanical exercises into works of art. And I suspect there are millions of people out there who feel the same—who see a potential to create art where others may only see a task.

Write out five activities that require skill and attention to detail at work. Perhaps you’d identify crafting poetic legal briefings, designing a flawless website, building an elegant pitch deck for your startup, or carefully learning the names and interests of the colleagues with whom you work. The activities don’t have to be revolutionary—they need only be important to you and offer the opportunity for you to build your skill level over time. Set specific, measurable goals for yourself (for example, “I will know the names of each colleague on my floor in 30 days”) or share your aspirations with others (including your manager) where the activity is more subjective—such as an outstanding PowerPoint or user-friendly Excel model. Sharing your goals with others—team members, colleagues, or peers—commits you to these goals and allows you to engage your partners in your journey of self-improvement and mastery. I would often do this as a manager, letting my team know projects I was working on and asking them to provide feedback on my progress. It also modeled the kind of craft I was looking for from them. What are the areas in which you can practice craft, and who can you engage to celebrate with you and hold you accountable?

Pursue a hobby that allows for craft

I had a work colleague who had a remarkable Etsy store. She made finely crafted sculptures from nature—eagles, horses, and antelope, among other things. She was never going to be a professional sculptor, in the sense of pursuing it as a career rather than an avocation. It would never pay the bills, and she was happy in her job. Nevertheless, she was passionate about sculpting, spending untold hours improving her craft, bringing greater beauty to the world one small piece at a time.

The fact that this hobby would never be her career did nothing to diminish the purpose and enjoyment she found in her art. I’ve found similar meaning in the repetition and perfection-seeking of multiple avocations that have varied through my life—writing, humor, public speaking, or running. And I bet you have, too, whether that particular pursuit was Toastmasters, CrossFit, or Fortnite.

Obviously, some avocations are more edifying than others. Winston Churchill, for example, found solace and purpose in painting at the heights of his struggles with depression (his “black dog”) and the World War. He wrote a book about the power of this hobby in his life, Painting as a Pastime. It has inspired countless others to adopt the hobby, including U.S. President George W. Bush, who processed some of the most important challenges he’s faced through art. Warren Buffett plays ukulele, Nick Offerman does woodworking, Leslie Mann unicycles, and Susan Sarandon is a Ping-Pong enthusiast. Some people take up their own health and wellbeing as an avocation, using meditation to sharpen their minds and relieve anxiety or training in a sport to improve their physical health.

What are your hobbies? In chapter 5 we emphasized their importance. Here, we should examine their craft. As with your occupation, sit and write down opportunities for craft in one or two of your most important avocations. Begin to set your own improvement goals and hold yourself accountable to those goals—perhaps incorporating feedback from friends or a significant other or by competing (as in the next section). In exercise, this is easy. Committing to set personal bests on your Peloton each month, for example, or improving your 5K time by 5% per month is a quantifiable goal. In other areas—from cooking to music—you may need more subjective measures or the feedback of a community through performance of competition. Find a buddy to do the activity with you, encourage you, or hold you accountable to pursuing your craft.

Turning a hobby into an opportunity for craft can be the difference between a mindless pursuit and the pursuit of mindfulness and meaning.

Find opportunities to compete

There’s a reason millions of people sign up for road races each year—5Ks, 10Ks, marathons—even though they know they’ll be, at best, average in their fields. There’s a reason “gamification” is such a buzzword in business. And there’s a reason your sixth grader preps for spelling and geography bees, and almost every kid loves participating in annual field days at school.

Many of us are wired for competition. We find the process of competing—not just winning but competing itself—edifying. Participating in a competition allows you to make your skills public and weigh them against the talents of others. It incentivizes you to focus and improve and can create meaningful moments both when you gain an edge over the competition and when you fail but stand back up and try again.

Once you’ve identified opportunities for craft in your work and avocations that allow for craft, find ways to compete: chili cook-offs, CrossFit competitions, judo matches, dog shows, photography competitions, or work hackathons can all provide an outlet to not only focus deeply on skill building but to measure your progress against that of others and put yourself to the test. Some people fear competition, but healthy competition in multiple areas of your life can be edifying and lead to real focus on craft in all you do. The purpose of competition is winning. But the key to healthy competition is realizing the meaning in simply committing to improvement and progress in the things we love.

You’ve listed tasks at work and avocations that you can craft earlier in this chapter. Now how can you compete? Competition can be as grand as entering the Boston Marathon or as simple as finding five friends to text the number of steps you’ve taken that day. At work, it can be entering a hackathon as a computer programmer or coming up with goals as a team that everyone can pursue as a friendly game over the course of a week or month.

If the idea of competing publicly is just not your thing, or if the craft you are pursuing doesn’t lend itself to formal competition, find ways to compete with yourself. Track your personal bests at weightlifting and commit to improving them. Time your performance of a task at work and watch it shorten as you become proficient. Monitor your students’ test scores and commit, internally, to incremental improvement for your classes each year. It can still be worthwhile to compete with others, but sometimes it is healthiest and easiest to simply compete with one’s past self.

Appreciate the craft of others

Sportswriter Bill Simmons once wrote a remarkable little article titled “God Loves Cleveland.” The article, published on Grantland.com, is focused on LeBron James’s 2014 decision to leave Miami and return to his hometown team in Ohio. But my favorite passages from the piece are from an aside Simmons writes on the poetry and intensity of watching Michael Jordan play basketball. In part, he writes:

I watched Jordan play in person, many times, at various stages of his career. My favorite version was post-baseball MJ—a little humbled, a little wiser, still kicking everyone’s collective rear end—when the Bulls occasionally rolled through Boston and eviscerated the carcass of Celtic Pride. One particular night, we turned on the locals and started cheering what we were watching. It didn’t happen because we were selling out, but because we had witnessed a special kind of greatness during the Bird Era. We knew what it meant. We knew how fragile it was. We missed seeing it. Watching those Bulls was like catching up with an old friend.

Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time—perhaps the greatest athlete of all time. Millions of people around the world grew up admiring him—people of all races and creeds, in every country, even those who cared nothing for basketball. Because something in us is drawn to greatness, to seeing a thing performed in ways that defy human limitation and exhibit otherworldly craft. We love to watch Serena Williams fire a serve, Dustin Johnson hit a perfect drive, Bruce Springsteen bring down the house with a live performance, or Maya Angelou read poetry. And those who know a craft appreciate its perfection even more.

Like anything, we can train ourselves to appreciate a craft more. The late Clayton Christensen, one of the most remarkable minds in the history of business, recounted a story once about his first year as a student at Harvard Business School. He would sit quietly in the back of class and keep a journal of the best questions his classmates had asked that day. At home he’d reflect on that journal, marveling at the insight of a great question and, step-by-step, training his own mind to formulate them.

You’re surrounded by extraordinarily talented people every day. Reflecting on some of those people, how they achieve their attention to craft, and the impact that has on them and others can deepen your sense of appreciation and gratitude while also encouraging you on your journey of self-improvement. Ask yourself:

  1. Who are five people in my life who display extraordinary craft in something that they do?
  2. What do they do, and what makes it so extraordinary?
  3. What practice or talent must it take to achieve that craft?
  4. What sacrifices have they made?
  5. What can I learn from it?

For example, I once had an executive assistant who treated her job with extraordinary craft. She was methodical about her basic responsibilities, often helping me to better manage my schedule in ways I didn’t even know I needed—scheduling travel time between meetings, color coding my calendar, blocking out dedicated work time, and helping me think through my meeting rhythm with my team and even consistent places to have meetings. Then, because she was so incredibly efficient, she became our team’s de facto head of communications and client experience—leading projects and helping us improve communications. On top of all this, she did each of these things with a remarkable attitude and sense of positivity. I was extraordinarily impressed by her dedication to constantly improving her craft, and I learned a great deal from her.

Careful appreciation of others can rewire our brains—teaching us to look for the best in others, to appreciate the sacrifice and work of others, and to see more meaning in our own pursuit of craft.

A Call to Craft

There are enumerable opportunities for craft in your work and life. And the fulfillment and meaning you can get from becoming the best you can be—from perfecting something step by step—can be deeply rewarding. It can also inspire others to see their own lives differently and discern the opportunities they have to generate flow and a real sense of accomplishment. What are your opportunities to practice craft today and to celebrate it in the lives of others?

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