Originally Posted by
Pete Taran
Reading the latest thoughts on the decline of people willing to work with their hands (or wanting to) reminds me of a show on PBS I watch from time to time. It's called a Craftsman's Legacy. The host is a guy who claimed to be climbing the corporate ladder and got burned out and turned to a life of working with his hands. Every week there is some new Craftsman he visits and the show centers around how they got started in their craft and then the rest of the show is them working on that craft together. Some examples include making soap (with lye and fat), fly rod making from bamboo cane and even a guy who is a master calligrapher.
I've watched about 20 shows over the past year, and a few common themes have emerged regardless of the craft:
1) If you are going to be successful and make a living at a craft, you need to be the best there is
2) You have to embrace new ways to tackle old problems
3) You need to be wiling to be Craftsman, Marketing and Sales VP as well as Book Keeper. Being savvy with social media doesn't hurt.
4) You need to be willing to work very hard, for decades even, to accomplish the above and achieve success.
If you haven't seen this show, you might want to check it out. Most of the shows involve people working with hand tools. It's worth a look and dovetails nicely with this discussion.
As an aside, being an avid fly fisherman myself, the guy who builds rods from bamboo is JD Wagner. I discovered after googling him that he is from the next town over from where I live. As a result of seeing the show, I'm signed up next summer to make a split cane bamboo rod in one of his week long classes.
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