Craftsmanship as a Life Skill

29 July 2023

The first serious job I had was working at the Riverside in Oakville.  That’s a long time ago now, and that place—in downtown Oakville, on the west bank of the Sixteen Mile Creek—is long demolished but some of what I learned remains.

An older French chef was astonished to realize that he’d hired me out of MacDonald’s and yet I couldn’t cook a hamburger.  So he and his assistant taught me how to make up hamburgers, refrigerate them in separable stacks of six, preparing for the next shift.  As well as cooking and seasoning, the presentation of the food, on the plate, was important and there was a precise manner in which that was to be done.  All of this was skill building but it was also the beginning of an awareness that something could be done half-consciously or with attention to detail.  I’ll use the latter phrase as a preliminary definition of craftsmanship.

craftsman 2. An artist as considered with regard to technique.  (Morris, 1975, p. 309).  To broaden this, from the individual to a state of being, an artifact produced with craftsmanship manifests artistic consideration with regard to technique.  There’s a sense, within that definition, that craftsmanship = skill + concentration.  I would say that craftsmanship enters the realm of art when the skill distinguishes one skilled worker’s work from that of other similarly skilled workers—some workers enter a different class.  So, what are the steps to getting there?

Let’s start with the assumption that intention, protocols & tools are the parts required to create a distinguished artefact. Carpenters need hammers, fasteners, squares, tape measures, planes, drills, and saws to work wood into the shapes and forms usually outlined in a drawing.  So we have tools and we have preliminary intention through drawings of the desired design.  The other part of intention is the concentration brought to each step by the carpenter but that’s a choice each carpenter has to make.  She can go into automatic pilot, to get the job done, or she can focus on each measurement, each cut, and each joint to create a more precisely fitted assembly.  Those are the protocols shaped by a human will.  Interestingly, we’ve forgotten the object or material with which carpenters work: wood.  Carpenters shape, fasten, and install various wooden assemblies.  But what if our object or material is our own lives?

I believe our outline holds.  The intent is the life you choose to live based on your individually identified values.  That life is not designed by an architect or engineer but by you and your bone-deep and wide-eyed sense of where you feel you belong in the puzzle that is 21^st-century humanity.  That intent is heavily shaped by mass media and the content you choose to allow into your consciousness.  If you read Stoicism, your intent (and protocols) will be different than if you read Kant.  Stoic protocols will have you focused on the things within your own hula-hoop i.e., minding your own business with diligence and attention.  That focus on diligence and attention will, over time, increase your efficacy and skill.  But, much of your efficacy depends on the tools you bring to the job, and your ability to use and maintain those tools. 

Alternately, if you spend a lot of your time on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media, you will likely acculturate to what well paid marketers want you to have as your primary intention: more.  More money, more glamour, more clothing, more cars, more property.  It’s interesting what my mind threw at me after writing that sentence.  I heard the words written by Thomas Hobbes in 1651 regarding the character of life without a social contract. He felt such a life would be “...solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan in Harris, 1960).  Too many people are living this sort of life already.  Per my understanding, the application of more craftsmanship to the material of their lives can change this.

We’ll make this more concrete next week by looking at specific tools, in their own hierarchy, in an attempt to make clearer how craftsmanship applies to each act we perform.

Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.