HANDS:
hands
hands title:
§4. Rule 3: Skill
hands date:
20 May 2022
hands text:
Skill – from Old Norse skilja “to part, to distinguish, to separate”.
01
During the golden age of craftsmanship, when making things was the most important activity, the training of young people entering an industry was controlled by various guilds. A young person was apprenticed to a master craftsman for a term of seven years and learned the trade by observing the work of older men and assisting with whatever minor tasks they were permitted to do.
02
There were neither books nor technical institutions. And although the end result — a certain level of skill — was regulated by the guilds, the process of reaching this level remained at the discretion of the master.
03
This means that our real knowledge about the nature of craftsmanship and how to become good at it is limited. All we know is that the magic somehow passes from one person to another in a long and non-transparent process called apprenticeship.
04
Although this system, cherished by generations of craftsmen, is now mostly gone, the method and the main ideas — albeit in modified form — have survived. Many people in different trades and in different places still go through a similar process. They have little in common: they don’t follow a uniform routine or a single curriculum, and they are subject to hardly any external control.
05
There is, however, one common trait — the belief that any complex activity can be reduced to a small number of basic skills. An apprentice would master these basic skills, one at a time, until they became second nature.
06
It is deeply ironic that in the modern world, full of professional trainers, standards and learning outcomes, this simple idea is often forgotten: a perfect whole cannot be built from imperfect parts.
07
Consider what basic components make up the skill you are trying to master, and everything will suddenly become easier.