Why Craft Masters Love Their Jobs

August 13, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Every job is about two things: what it brings to you and what it brings to others.

Today, new iterations of old-time, blue-collar jobs are providing a new breed of craft masters with the personal validation that comes from using their specialized knowledge to serve grateful customers. These butchers, haircutters, distillers, bartenders and a host of others celebrate proud skills / that enable them to produce something tangible / for people they know.

Each part of their work definition speaks to the quality (or lack of quality) in our work too.

For example, many of our jobs seem inconclusive. I spent all these hours, was aggravated along the way, tried to stay motivated, but at the end of the day, week, month or year, what have I accomplished?

Having something (anything) beyond a paycheck to show for your effort is what’s missing in many, if not most, service economy jobs today. As those in manufacturing, farming and fishing—big jobs a century ago—have left to take on “office work,” what the modern workforce actually produces has gotten harder to either describe or personalize.

Customer satisfaction – Quality control – Teamwork – Greater efficiencies – More sales.

What is your contribution to any of them? Whatever you’re adding may earn you a raise, but probably does little to improve your work engagement because there was almost nothing tangible that you either produced or could “own.” When the fruits of your labor feel this remote from your effort, the level of job satisfaction always tends to be low.

On the other hand, think of the difference if you were giving someone a great haircut, mixing an unforgettable cocktail, or aging a steak to perfection. There is nothing remote about these benefits because someone “thanks you” for your expertise right away. You can take their gratitude home with you that night and recall, with pride, your accomplishments before returning to work tomorrow. It’s sustaining, makes you feel that you’re doing something worthwhile, even when the financial rewards are less than an office job might bring.

What is the calculus that motivates today’s craft masters, and how could their trade-offs change your thinking about the jobs you have or the jobs you want?

Among many other things, Instagram is a forum for craft masters, and I’m following several, including haircutter @crimsonjenny, woodworker @gingerwoodturner, and meat maestro @butcherfarrell. Everyday they show me their work, celebrate their tools, and introduce me to their clients. Talk about job satisfaction—it doesn’t get any more tangible than it seems to be for them:

What exactly do jobs like these bring to the person doing them? For one thing, they provide something that is clear and measureable to them.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton describes the experience like this:

“How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object—whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug—and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.”

Concreteness can also come from “living the experience.” It’s akin to what many professionals are looking for when they pursue endurance sports, effectively making their exploits in extreme situations into second jobs. As noted last week in Outside magazine, what these men and women may want the most is to be able to explain to themselves and to others at least one thing that they’re accomplishing with their skills:

“Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they’ll need at least a few minutes to explain their answer, accounting for [office] politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of their client, the role of their team, and a variety of other external factors. Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, however, and the answer becomes much simpler [for the one who’s giving the answer as well as for the one who’s hearing it].”

In the same article, Michael Crawford says that using your skills this way relieves you of the need to offer “chattering interpretations” to explain your worth. You can simply point to the race you ran, the mountain that you climbed, or the house that you built. Results like these provide demonstrations of your value that are readily apparent to everyone.

By contrast, how much “knowing appreciation” did you receive for your work last week? How proud are you of your output, how convinced of your worth given what you accomplished with your skills and experience?

Craft masters know about the pride and sense of empowerment that come from demonstrating their skills. But they also know something about work that no commitment to endurance sports can provide: the gratitude of serving someone beside yourself.

Craft masters are connected to their customers in at least 3 ways. For one thing, those receiving their services are often their peers. As such, their work is a way for both servers and served to recover some of the place-based kinship that was disrupted when national manufacturers, big box stores, on-line merchants and assembly-line service providers drove their predecessors out of business.

Both craft master and customer also respect the specialized knowledge and skill that is being demonstrated. Both may even see themselves as connoisseurs. Customers like to have their steaks, cocktails or haircuts lavished with attention, and the masters revel in their customers’ knowing appreciation of what they do.

Finally, there is transparency about what craft masters add and deliver. Customers generally know where their raw materials come from and how they transform them. It’s the opposite of products appearing on most store shelves whose point of origin, manufacture and supply chain are cloaked in mystery. Transparency establishes loyalty to the work itself and tends to deepen the bonds of trust between master and customer.

Pride and confidence in your skill and experience.

Mutual bonds of gratitude with the beneficiaries of your work.

These rewards don’t belong to craft masters alone. Instead they represent choices (and sometimes trade-offs) at the heart of every job. When these rewards are important enough, you either find them in your current jobs or demand them in future ones. They are essential benefits in every work bargain, and far too often, we’ve forgotten to expect them.

(If you are interested in reading more, a sociologist’s take on jobs in the new urban economy is provided in Richard Ocejo’s recent book and Michael Crawford’s classic essay, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” can be found here.)

You Are What You Do

July 9, 2017 By David Griesing 1 Comment

The story about Cowtown and Grant Harris, as told in this week’s Yeti sponsored video, plays like a bedtime story. It grabs you by the emotional lapels at those first shots of galloping horses far below. And it never lets go.

Once upon a time and somehow, improbably, up to the present, the oldest rodeo in the United States just happens to be 7 miles from Exit 1 on the New Jersey Turnpike, or 20 odd miles southeast of Philadelphia as the crow flies. It launched in 1929 to attract bigger crowds to the Salem County Fair, and with a few fits and starts during the Depression and War years, is still going strong.

The self-described “Best Show on Dirt” runs every Saturday night from May to September. Its roster includes 7 separate events: bull riding, bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, girl’s barrel racing, team roping and tie-down roping.

In saddle bronc riding, the cowboy holds on with one hand while keeping the other raised towards the heavens in the hope that he can stick to the saddle for the whole 8 seconds. A smooth, rhythmic ride is what scores the best. In girl’s barrel racing on the other hand, the prize goes to the fastest. Riders enter the arena at full speed, rounding each barrel in a cloverleaf pattern before galloping to the finish line. Timed to a hundreth of a second, the Cowtown tag for this event is “Nothin’ beats pretty girls and fast horses.”

All two hours come with non-stop commentary from the master of ceremonies (“Talk about closer than a coat of paint! Let’s put our hands together and appreciate a good ride!) and banjo playing by groups like Dave and the Wranglers, as reported by an erstwhile anthropologist writing for the Times.

Grant is fourth in a line of cowboys named Harris to run the Cowtown Rodeo. But while he was born to it, he grew to become a champion bull rider out West when his father decided to sell the place. The stamina and skills that win rodeos on a competitive circuit are far different from those it takes to run a business with rosters of weekly competitors, stalls full of livestock, a couple dozen employees, and a village of buildings sitting on hundreds of acres. Should he leave a job he was good at to become the CEO of a rodeo?

It was the first time that Harris had to grapple with his statement: “What we do is what we are. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Harris not only returned to run the institution that his dad was leaving, he also had to adapt the Rodeo to changing customer tastes. When he got involved, Cowtown’s weekly competitions were seen on TV, but as Americans left its farms for its cities, Harris needed to keep the crowds coming. And succeed he did. First time visitors are always surprised at the length of the lines, the enthusiasm of the crowds, and how red-and-white signs for establishments like Russ’s Electric of Pennsville, Farmer’s Bank of Mullica Hill, Pole Tavern Equipment identify the regular viewing boxes that are filled with locals.

Today though, at 62, Harris faces another quandary. It’s about what will become of his life’s work. His daughters Courtney and Katy grew up in saddles right next to him. But they’re grown now, and as we learn from the clip, Courtney marries a cowboy and moves out West, while Katy stays closer to home, marrying an electrician named RJ. You can see how capable his wife Betsy is—what a working partner she’s been—but how are they going to carry on? Should they sell their land and business to developers when the interest on what a sale is likely to net would be more than the Cowtown Rodeo clears in a year?

Each Harris family member has to decide given how each has lived. Because what we’ve done and will continue to do is who we are.

After some bare knuckles truth telling—in the form of Harris counseling RJ that he and Katy “would have a difficult time growing together in their marriage” if he doesn’t get involved with the Rodeo’s operation—the family decides to stay put, with Katy and RJ continuing the tradition. Harris says that he needs no more money than he has already. But in the family members’ tear-filled eyes, there is a deeper calculus than that.

Nothing else we can imagine doing could ever bring us more.

Some of this story is about passing on a legacy. Who will care for the garden I’ve grown? Who will go on meeting the needs that my work has met? Who will fill my shoes and my reputation when I’m gone?

Some of this story is about furthering a legacy. How much is the work that you’re offering who I really am? Does my talent, skill, and experience “fit” this role, or would it be more fitting to do something else? What does my head say? My heart?

And finally, some of what Cowtown is about is good storytelling. Long before Yeti made videos like this one, it was selling coolers that people thought improved their status so much that they reportedly were stealing them out of one another’s boats and trucks. (Particularly in the South and Midwest, “if you’ve got Air Jordan or Lululemon money, but prefer to unwind by bass fishing and deer hunting, you can say it with a Yeti.”)

That was the first good story that Yeti told. But over time, the company also came to see videos like Cowtown as a way to connect with customers whose passions it shared. And it seems to be working. Since Cowtown (its latest) launched a couple of days ago, it has had 53,000 views on YouTube, which doesn’t include people like me who caught it in a social media feed.

Now I can’t wait to go and live part of this story too.

Jury Duty is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have

March 12, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Jury Duty is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have

My reflex on getting called to jury duty is still “how can I get out of it,” but I know that’s mostly the reptilian, fight-or-flight part of my brain. Who’s asking, and why are you picking on me? But these days one of my higher order functions is quicker to declare (just a little more loudly): I hope that I’ll be fit enough to serve.

When put on notice for jury duty, nobody wants their routine to be interrupted, to rub elbows with strangers, or spend days in an airless courtroom for the bus fare plus change you’ll be paid. The first impulse is running the other way. But on the flip side of “No-o-o-o” are some pretty persuasive “yeses.”

Jury duty is a call for neighbors to come together and decide whether someone else who lives or works here has failed to act in the ways they’re supposed to. The first question worth asking is whether you want to have a say in the matter or leave it to someone else? In the 2016 presidential election, 40% (or more than 92 million eligible voters) left it for somebody else to decide—perhaps the most alarming statistic in America today.

“Being a good citizen” used to be all most people needed. You didn’t ignore the jury summons, the IRS letter, or a chance to vote for your representatives. Well no longer.

More of us are scofflaws today—literally scoffing at the law—because (maybe, hopefully) these civic obligations will just forget about us altogether if we keep on disregarding them. Here in Philadelphia, so many ignore their calls to jury duty (175,000 out of 545,000 summons issued in 2015) that the court system has simply thrown up its hands when it comes to enforcement. Of those who respond, my guess is that many do so grudgingly. This is A VERY BIG (AND RESENTFUL) VOICE that says: “I just don’t care enough to help decide ‘what’s acceptable’ and ‘what’s not’ for those of us who live here.”

I’d argue that jury duty is at least as “citizen-gratifying” as marching with a protest sign, but there are other benefits that may sound less like a civics course for those who still need convincing.

I was picked for a jury this week, so these benefits are fresh in my mind. Lawyers never used to get picked, but this was the third time for me. Aside from seeing one of the jobs I do from an entirely different angle, the two most compelling pluses involve connection and storytelling. Here’s what I mean.

The deeper we dive into our phones, the more disconnected we become from other people. There is nothing like a closet-sized jury room to introduce you to members of your community. In your hours together, you share snippets about lives and work, while your deliberations together are an intimate opportunity to encounter them through their senses of right and wrong. Close quarters seldom get warmer than that.

Particularly in big cities, the other jurors are likely to come from different “walks of life” than your neighbors next door. The bubbles we increasingly inhabit have everyone looking more or less the same and agreeing about nearly everything. A Philadelphia jury allows very different bubbles to touch and merge for a brief common purpose, and that’s been a cause for optimism each time I’ve experienced it. When you fear that America’s sky is falling, you are reminded how FUNNY, WISE, HUMBLE and DECENT other members of the public can be when you come together this way.

The stories you see and hear as a juror also tend to make the ones you’d otherwise be following pale in comparison. Sometimes the vivid characters or plot lines emerge from friendships that develop among jurors. As often, they’re from the comedies and tragedies that are playing out in front of you in the courtroom.

The comedy is usually unintended. This week, for example, counsel for a widow suing her husband’s doctors had such a strong accent that when he introduced himself all he could communicate to us clearly was his first name. His elderly client entered the courtroom in a wheelchair that appeared to be stolen from one of the airlines. And the attorney for the doctors had a skirt that was so short she practically mooned us when she sat down after introducing herself. There are no second chances to make first impressions like that.

But the stakes involved in “who’s telling the better story” can also be soul crushing or inspiring. I’ve also been on a jury that had to decide whether to impose the death penalty. Before we were selected, the testimony from the potential juror pool on their beliefs about crime and punishment said more about personal character than you’re likely to hear anywhere else.

The defendant in this case had allegedly killed his confederate in a drug deal, along with several potential witnesses who were unlucky enough to be there too when it all went down. The prosecutors thought they were hotshots. The accused was a 20-something who seemed impossibly blasé about being there. Whose facts would we believe—whose story—with this many lives in the balance?

Every trial is not a murder trial, but it’s also true that the rest of our lives rarely approach the influential place where jurors go to work everyday. As a juror, you’re helping to decide how one storyline in your community draws to its conclusion. For a little of your time, you become a character in the narrative, part of its truth as well as its consequences.

A version of this essay appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 12, 2017. It also appeared in Newsday, the Charlotte Observer and Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Grace Note

July 11, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in the Middle East, a mother’s voice cuts through the terrible din. The words belonged to Rachel Fraenkel, whose son Naftali had recently been kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank along with two other Jewish Israeli teens. In apparent revenge for these three deaths, Mohammed Abu Khdier, a Palestinian teenager, was kidnapped in Jerusalem and allegedly burned alive.

Fraenkel statement came after the traditional week of mourning for her son, and just hours after Mohammed’s funeral.

Even in the abyss of mourning for Gilad, Eyal and Nafali, it is difficult for me to describe how distressed we are by the outrage committed in Jerusalem—the shedding of innocent blood in defiance of all morality, of the Torah, of the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country. . . No mother or father should ever have to go through what we are going through, and we share the pain of Mohammed’s parents.

You had to be listening to hear Fraenkel’s words over the bloodlust, the recrimination, the political exclamations, and the missile volleys between Israel’s cities and Gaza. It was a voice crying in the wilderness.

L’Chaim.

Samuel and Pearl Oliner began their book about rescuers of Jews and other victims during World War II with the following observation:

That people act in the service of their own self-interest is a maxim we are quite likely to accept. We are not even startled when they behave demonically. What we find difficult to accept or explain are behaviors that appear self-transcendent. (Preface at xviii)

Some of what is difficult “to accept or explain” comes from our reluctance to imagine the painful place that Fraenkel spoke from—to inhabit that sense of loss with her as she crossed a seething divide to grieve for another child who is tied by the cruelest of circumstances to her own. Because we hope it will never happen to us, that we’ll never have to find out what this kind of pain is like, we don’t take the five or ten minutes to envision for ourselves the possibilities that might exist beyond the pain. If we could be better at imagining “all the way through,” self-transcendence might be less of a puzzlement.

Sadly and far more often, graceful words and actions don’t break though the 24/7 overload to register with us at all. It’s the daily static of boredom, casual neglect, being hungry, bus exhaust, general shabbiness, deadlines, rudeness, fallen trees, gossip, bike riders yelling at cabdrivers, humidity, horniness, office chatter, cell phones, somebody complaining, body odor, feeling insecure, TV. The transcendent rarely breaks through it all, which means that on those occasions when it does, its break-through probably deserves its own place and time.

Prayer is partly the contemplation of exemplary stories, like Rachel Fraenkel’s: maybe on Sundays, or Friday nights after sundown, or at the end of the day before you go to sleep. Prayer never required a religion or specific words, but always calls for believing in something bigger than yourself, something that pulls you into a broader web of connectedness, and helps you to transcend the regular stuff of life.

Being quiet with your own ruminations is also required for prayer to happen, which reminds me of Tony Robbins tweet yesterday, that “Men prefer an electric shock to being alone with their thoughts.” (Silence is never as easy as it sounds.) Finally, it helps if you can recognize the intervals of grace that flutter like butterflies across everything else that clamors for your awareness.

They are often the places where hope can be found.

Negative Space

April 30, 2014 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Your negative space is as important as what you choose to fill it with.

Negative: “Consisting in or characterized by the absence rather than the presence of distinguishing features.” (Oxford English Dictionary)

It supports and defines.

Statue of a Poilu (French infantryman during World War I) at war memorial in XVth district/REUTERS-Charles Platiau — Statue of a Poilu (French infantryman during World War I) at Paris war memorial / REUTERS-Charles Platiau

Invites memory, healing and expectation.

Views of proposed Memorial Sørbråten in Norway, to honor victims of 2011 Massacre/Jonas Dahlberg — Views of proposed Memorial Sørbråten in Norway, to honor victims of 2011 Massacre / Jonas Dahlberg

Always leave enough space to fill with life.