In melancholy for craftsmanship
Why doing small things can feel better than doing big things
It’s generally hard to find fulfilment and peace in entrepreneurship. It takes a special character to be peaceful in the middle of a battleground, and entrepreneurship feels exactly like one—the continuous stream of problems and challenges that a founder has to withstand and sometimes redirect back and turn into opportunities.
It’s very different from traditional skill-based craft, where the master gets rewarded proportionally to the result and can expect fulfilment from doing work a little bit better than yesterday because the feedback loop from the world will be positive.
It’s much easier to get satisfaction from optimization and getting to perfection than from surviving just to switch from one problem to another.
If you built something with your hands—you know what I’m talking about, if you played competitive sports—you know what I’m talking about, if you have a signature dish that you cooked a hundred times—you know what I’m talking about.
Even as founder, I noticed how fulfilling the rare moments of work on a product, design, or financials, and how heartwarming it is to polish something to a perfect result, that you can be proud of, based on your personal judgement, in contrast to dealing with a crazy customer or an arrogant investor, that will never make you feel that what you do is enough. It’s satisfying to complete something and see the result, and the business can never be completed, it’s an endless uphill battle against the market.
From another perspective is a problem of breadth vs depth. Entrepreneurship is a development in breadth, where each day brings you a new challenge, and teaches you a little bit of everything, from law to marketing, allowing you to find the minimal viable solution, and not letting you go deep into anything, because the next challenges are already at the door, waiting to be solved. In craftsmanship, you work on one type of task but learn 100 different ways to do it. And that’s development in depth. That’s the skill.
The first is an adventure, the second is a path.
Entrepreneurship is not a skill and can’t be trained, it is a mental attitude that can be achieved and maintained at the cost of your life energy. (Paradoxically, the most obvious fulfilment it gives is the fulfilment of using your potential at full capacity.)
I’m a little envious of all the baristas, roofers, painters, dancers, shoemakers, manicurists, architects, scientists, musicians, and accountants. As they can live a life full of improvement and enjoy being appreciated for getting better at what they do.
The only things we can get better at as founders are tolerance to the shit from without, and acceptance that the better we do—the more of the shit we going to face.
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