If work is a four-letter word, leisure your escape, and neither satisfies, then I have an antidote for you.

The antidote to the stresses of life in the digital age is learning to make beautiful and useful things by hand for the people you know and love. (While it is woodworking for me, it doesn’t have to be for you. It can be any creative hand craft).

This is a lesson I have learned through 40 years of woodworking, which I contrast with the lessons of many other jobs I’ve had — from parking lot coordinator in a summer stock theater, to associate editor at a magazine, to senior project manager at an experience design firm, from freelance bartending to teaching High School English in an international school, and many more. Those jobs taught me everything from emotional exhaustion to anger management.

The only work that rivals creative making for satisfaction is teaching other people how to make beautiful and useful things. I get to see the lightning in their eyes as they discover the joys of the process.

If you love your work, you are among the lucky few. In many jobs today, we work because we must. Jobs have become industrialized, digitized, and commoditized. It can be hard to find purpose or value in our jobs when they are insignificant, impersonal contributions to giant enterprises. Driven by necessity and fear, we believe that the hard work that leads to success, or that the idle leisure it buys, will eventually make us happy. But instead that hard work gives us little more than increasing rates of depression and anxiety.

Before industrialization, making things for the people in our lives was how our species survived and thrived. Hand work was all work, and it was the central, joyful process of life. Creative making was our purpose.

Pleasure is the original motivation for all work, feeling fully alive its reward.

We can’t all quit our day jobs and survive in the Digital Age. But we can access the joy of workmanship--and truly pursue happiness--by finding creative work that fits our inclinations.

If you’re not a woodworker at heart, you might be a weaver, or a potter. You might be a cook or a blacksmith. You might find your passion in gardening or leatherwork. You won’t know until you explore.

My latest book, The Manual Manual: Your Guide to Learning Hand Crafts, an antidote to the stresses of the digital age, will be available in April, 2025. It will be a guide to access the deeply pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful process of making things by hand, whether as a hobby or a profession. Until then, you can’t go wrong just taking a class, or talking with a friend who has a craft hobby or profession. Also, my interview-based podcast, Hand Craftsmanship in the Digital Age explores how master craftsmen got good, and what they get out of their work.

Just make something! For someone! Make it as useful and beautiful as you can! Keep doing this and eventually you will become a master of your craft! You and the the people you make things for will all reap the benefits.

Thought of the Day, February 4, 2025

“I never wanted to be famous, I only wanted to be great” -- Ray Charles

If this quotation is true, Ray Charles was crazy by today’s standards.

We live in an era of Famous for Being Famous. The desire to be known, valued, and esteemed is widespread. We almost don’t care of the famous have any real talent or not.

What of the unsung heroes, which is to say, the merely “great”? This is when someone is particularly good at something, but only those who know that person best--the people who love them--know how great they are. We might know one or two, or be one ourselves.

We become great when we achieve the capacity to make or do something that is among the best. We recognize greatness when we see it, because we feel it. We shouldn’t have to be told something is great to appreciate it. A great meal is simply an amazing experience, delicious and presented in a way that heightens our pleasure. If we have to be told what we ate was amazing, it wasn’t a great meal for us.

Soetsu Yanagi, a Japanese craft critic, argued that the most beautiful things were made by artisans who never wanted to be famous. His book, The Unknown Craftsman, compresses this idea in the title. But if you feel a sense of injustice, that somehow it would be better if these artisans were recognized, personally, for their tremendous accomplishments, Yanagi argues otherwise.

His counterintuitive point is that you can’t make beautiful things by trying to make beautiful things. Beauty is the unconscious result of just doing what you do really well. Consciously-intended beauty comes from the head, not the heart. You have to think it through to understand it, you can’t just intuitively feel it. It can intrigue and excite, but it cannot capture. Consciously-intended beauty announces itself. It is made to be famous, for many people to appreciate and applaud it. The greatest beauty, however, is an immediate--and very personal--experience. A bowl made for anyone is not personal, but a bowl made by a great artist, just for me, is more beautiful than anything, in part because it encapsulates that act of giving.

I am not certain, but I think Ray Charles was making a comment on how fame can be a burden. Imagine not being able to walk down the street without people turning their heads, demanding autographs? I guess it would be amusing and enjoyable for a day or two, but pretty quickly, normal life would become hard. You’d always wonder if your friends were friends because they liked you, or were attracted to your fame. Have an uninterrupted conversation in a restaurant? Impossible. Millions of people are entitled to your time when you’re famous.

Yanagi is also thinking of the burden of fame. To consciously strive to make something beautiful is to strive for fame, not greatness. That maker wants to be known for making beautiful things.

What does unknown greatness get you as a craftsman? Mastery is felt internally, as a kind of peaceful humility, I think. The old saying that the more you learn, the less you know applies. I imagine the satisfaction of the Song Dynasty Imperial potters, as they knew their work was good, and yet…how tomorrow might teach them something new, and the joy of that process. I like to imagine they made each while thinking of the person who would use them, and appreciate them.

Thought of the Day, March 12, 2025

The Manual Manual has a draft cover.

It needs a frame, but I cannot figure out how to give it one.

Aiming to finish the layout/design/prepress by the middle of April. Then to you!

Thought of the Day, March 17, 2025

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. While we avoided Chicago’s green river experience, we did raise a glass to all favorite things Irish, from W.B. Yeats to The Pogues.

Additionally, I came across a cartoon about aliens discussing humanity’s strange work habits here. Below is an excerpt:

I hope it gives you a wry chuckle, to think that we don’t differ in kind, but only in degree, from slime mold. None of make any one thing? We all just contribute a part to a whole?

It’s a topic I touch on in The Manual Manual, though I don’t contemplate the political consequences of our approach to work. The latter is worth understanding at depth, for a government isn’t just a president, it is a bureaucracy, and each person in this network has a brain and makes decisions. Very little of what happens to a society is done to us. We do it to ourselves. But no more politics today.

I teach a furniture design class. One topic is to get students to understand that furniture design is a social activity. This is puzzling at first. Don’t we think of great designs as having a single designer’s name behind them?

The humble among great designers will say such things as they “stood on the shoulders of giants”, the less humble will accept the credit. In truth, there is no good design in a vacuum. Every truly great design has a client—the person who will use and appreciate what is made for them. Good design is latent in the relationship between maker and user.

Pure industrial design—objects made for a general population—will always be inferior in concept to the custom designed piece. It will lack the relationship between maker and user. It can be hard to pinpoint what elements that relationship resides in. The chair height? The arms? But anyone who has a beautiful and useful object made by someone they know understands the difference. This chair I bought online… but that chair was made for me by…. Which one is more special? For beauty is a social concept, defined by the person who sees and appreciates it. It is not an ideal residing in theoretical space. I can appreciate a line intellectually, but a line made for me has soul as well.

Why does a peacock have such amazing tail feathers? Because the peahen prefers peacocks with amazing tail feathers. This was Darwin’s great insight in his second great treatise The Descent of Man, and Selection In Relation to Sex. Beauty is latent in the relationship between man and woman.

So if aliens see us as complex slime mold, in which the essence of what we do resides between us, within our organization and relationships, and not inherent in any one of us, they are seeing us correctly.

I just realized that slime mold is often green. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Fear of Design Class, March 24, 2025

“Creativity is just problemsolving”

It always makes me happy to come across a like-minded woodworker. It confirms that I’m not completely insane, or if I am, that I’m participating in a group hallucination. David Picciuto of makesomething.com seems to be drinking from the same garden hose that I do. That’s a Gen X joke, if you’re younger than 35.

I learned of David Picciuto’s work through Todd Cohen, a friend at the Chicago School of Woodworking. Todd sent me this link: 10 bizarre but brilliant ways to improve your designs. It’s head-remains-on-shoulders design advice. I’m oddly reminded of Seth Godin, a marketer delightfully free of nonsense. And we need more common sense in this world.

Todd sent it because I teach a design class at the school. My goal is to help new woodworkers transition from supervised, structured classes to making things on their own. The class is practical, even called “Practical Furniture Design,” for students have very practical needs, and little appetite for endless explorations of questions such as “what is beauty?” and other over-beer meditations. But they still want to learn how to make useful and beautiful objects without following another person’s plans, even if they don’t state is that way.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle is to “demystify” design, take it off a professional, artistic pedestal, and remind people that creativity is just problemsolving, which we do in every daily activity. The car door handle freezes. How to unfreeze it? We have five guests and four chairs, what to do? These are all problems with solutions. Frankly, the average plumber and the Nobel-Prize winning physicist use precisely the same mental faculties in their work, the only difference is the questions they ask themselves, and the creative license they give themselves to solve the questions. “What is the nature of the universe?” is a question different only in degree from “what should I make for dinner”? And perhaps the latter is harder to solve.

When my students can allow themselves to do what they do naturally, they thrive. As a furniture maker, the problem is to make an object both useful and beautiful, both attractive (that we want to keep in our lives) and gets something done for us (has a purpose in our day). To do this, we have to start from an opinion, then act on it as a maker.

Students arrive in the class with questions about which joint to use, which tool to use, which part to make first, and how to draw up plans. They have something they want to make for their homes, and think of only the steps to get it done. We get to that, but I first bewilder and disorient them with ideas as they first need to look to be able to see to make what they really want, and don’t yet know they want. I get them to ask obvious, obnoxious questions, such as “if the table you want to make is a solution, what problems does it solve, and how well does it solve them?”

They see their task as learning independence around machinery. I see their task as learning independence of thought. The machinery part is, frankly, easy, and merely comes with practice once the process is understood and learned correctly. Learning the courage to design, and not be afraid of it, is a bit harder. Demystifying it is the first step.

I am grateful for demystifiers such as David Picciuto.