The Case for Craftsmanship

“'Good enough' is a disease, and 'not that bad' is the battle cry of mediocrity.” - Casey Weathers

In almost every aspect of American life, the standard for quality output has decreased. It’s since been replaced by mass commercialization that brings everything increasingly closer to the proverbial middle. In an ever-widening marketplace where scalability is paramount, lackluster corporatism runs rampant, staining everything it touches with a cheap aftertaste.

This is not to say that systems-based thinking isn't valuable. On the contrary, products built to scale often perform better when they are rooted in an appreciation of quality for quality’s sake.

This quest for quality is driven primarily by the craftsman — the person who deeply understands both how and why things work, and how to use them.

“Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman — not an artist.

There’s nothing wrong with that; the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen, though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying.” - Anthony Bourdain

Today, the craftsman class has sadly been replaced by the button pushers — people who, at their highest level, know how to use a system, but have no appreciation for how or why it works, and are completely helpless if something breaks.

For instance, understanding the base principles of physics, anatomy, physiology, and psychology lends a practitioner in the sports performance space a significantly higher probability of being able to deconstruct the system down to its constituent parts, identify the problem, and fix it.

This also allows the expert to move beyond the borders of accepted practice and previous convention into the realm of innovation.

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” - Pablo Picasso

This principles-based approach to quality will become exponentially more valuable as the era of artificial intelligence exits its infancy. The tasteless, AI-voice, mass-produced slop that’s infected every form of media will become even more prevalent. The button-pushing class will rightfully concede defeat to the onslaught of automation. Outliers in quality will have even more opportunity to cut through, and reach the masses by way of targeting the individual, not the other way around.

Artificial intelligence will become another tool of the true craftsman — democratizing even further the ability to learn new skills, automate useless tasks, and capitalize on a creative vision.

I find it highly likely that the trade-school model of apprenticeships has a large resurgence in the AI era. The more prevalent shortcuts become, the more valuable personal experience becomes, which can only be built and refined much in the same way as building muscle — quality reps and time under tension. There will also be a high, albeit delayed, return on developing taste through toiling for years towards becoming a craftsman.

It’s disgusting how detached most professionals have become from the fields they say they are experts in. Coaches that haven’t trained in years, teachers that haven’t taken the time to learn anything new, businessmen that have no experience using their own product. These people have very little skin in the game, and that lack of personal connection is tangible.

A friend of mine described this difference between the craftsman and button pushing classes as being akin to taking your car that won’t start to a Jiffy Lube versus taking it to an experienced mechanic.

The former will try and jumpstart the battery, and if that doesn’t work, then they’re out of ideas, because they don’t fundamentally understand the mechanism, and how to take it apart.

The craftsman understands how a combustion engine works, how the driveline transfers power from the engine to the wheels, and can conceptually diagram electrical wiring, allowing them to actually solve the problem.

A key method for developing a personal sense of taste as a craftsman is not only by way of rigorous focus directed towards one field, but also in building appreciation for quality as a concept through differential learning.

Exposure to a high variety of different products and styles, both inside and outside one's field of expertise, creates a more adaptable understanding of the concept of quality, just as exposure to a wide spectrum of movement patterns leads to more adaptable athletes. Some of my greatest personal revelations towards training theory have come from other sports and disciplines, ranging from outside sports to fields like cooking. All of this experience and personal inflection, backed by sound technical understanding, allows for a reinforced relationship with quality.

"In order to make delicious food, you must love delicious food.

The quality of ingredients is important, but you need to develop a palate of discerning good and bad.

Without good taste, you cannot make good food.

If your sense of taste is lower than the customers, how can you impress them?”

- Jiro Ono

As the button-pusher class is eviscerated, the high-performing businesses that will shape the future will not only put a great deal of resources into creating robust systems for their employees to use, but also on creating a systemized pipeline for cultivating the craftsmen of tomorrow.

One of the best ways to look forward is to look back, using the Lindy effect to see what methods of practice have been robust enough to stand the test of time. A company that has honed this craftsman pipeline for more than a century is Hermès, the creator of the Kelly and Birkin bags. They create some of the only products in the textile industry that are appreciating assets due to being such a outlier in quality. Hermes Birkin bags have an average yearly increase in value of 14.2%, outperforming the S&P 500.

Hermès is famous for never sacrificing on quality, and for its high rates of success on systematically building generation after generation of high-level operators. This process not only requires a well-built modus operandi, but also a great deal of personal care.

When looking at a luxury brand like Hermès, it’s easy to think that something as niche as a $10,000 dollar bag has limited impact on economics and culture. But much in the same way as the training protocols of world-class athletes such as Christian McCaffrey and Shohei Ohtani have had an incomprehensible impact on the world of sports performance at every level, Hermès has had a trickle-down effect on fashion.

The superior craftsmanship is unmistakable.

Happy Hunting.