HANDS:
hands
hands title:
§2. The Game of Habits
hands date:
12 May 2022
hands text:
Repeated thoughts determine actions,
repeated actions determine habits,
habits determine character,
and character determines destiny.
repeated actions determine habits,
habits determine character,
and character determines destiny.
01
People fail to master a craft because they have wrong ideas.
02
What they fail to understand, quite often, is that craftsmanship is a game of habits. It is the ability to use a limited number of basic skills to the, potentially, unlimited number of applications.
03
During the golden age of craftsmanship, when making things was the most important activity, the training of the young entering an industry was controlled by the various craft guilds. A young person was apprenticed to a master craftsman for a term of seven years, and learned the trade by observing the work done by the older men and by assisting in whatever minor tasks he was permitted.
04
There were neither books nor technical institutions. And although the end result, a certain level of skill, was controlled by the guilds, the process of reaching this level remained at the discretion of the master.
05
What this means is 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 man to another in a long and non-transparent process called apprenticeship. What happens between a master and an apprentice stays between the master and the apprentice.
06
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 of different trades and in different locations go through it. They have little in common. They don’t follow a uniform routine or a single curriculum and are subject to hardly any external control.
07
There is, however, one common trait – the belief that a complex activity can be reduced to a small number of basic skills. An apprentice would master basic skills, one at a time, until they become second nature.
08
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.
09
Consider what basic components make up the skill you are trying to master and everything will suddenly become easier.