Running a business with multiple moving parts is different to being a craftsperson, artist, sole trader responsible for only yourself. Although your craft is the reason the business exists, it often can become a victim to the demands of the business. Abstract elements such as staff management, marketing, sales, accounts and so on, become more important that the work itself.
Work
Articles on the subject of daily work and the role it should play in a healthy, happy, and worthwhile life as opposed to a daily grind and punishment which we choose to endure.
There Is No Point In Work, Unless…
I’ve got an office/workspace at the bottom of our small garden. It’s a converted shed. Last summer, twelve months, I cleared it out, and in a couple of weeks had my own private space for work. It’s a Godsend. Here I can work uninterrupted, blinkered for hours on end. The only sound is the hum […]
Move Closer To The Centre
On the edge, just inside the edge, there is the mainstream media–a glut of data–fabricated, manipulated, molded, spun. It’s where most people get their information. It’s the nature of surface level reality, but rather than thinking of this information distribution as a two-dimensional circle, consider it a sphere. Particles, waves, wavicles in constant motion, combining, separating, mutating. It’s not ours, we inherit it, then adopt and contribute to it.
Try Many Things
We can get into a rut when things don’t work out. You know, we try something we think we might do for a living and it turns out, for whatever reason, that people just aren’t biting. There’s no traction, you doubt yourself; you feel you’re wasting your time.
Is It Any of My Business?
Frederick Herzberg in his 1959 book The Motivation to Work, gave an account of an address made by management guru Peter Drucker to The American Psychological Association in the 1950s. Drucker apparently suggested that an investigation of workers’ job attitudes was immoral and unjustified. He believed that it was nobody’s business but the worker themselves, how they felt about their job.
A Return to Craft Based Work
We don’t know how to use our hands and our bodies any more. We can’t make things, practical things. We don’t know how to grow food, to fix a roof, or build a wall. Some of us do, but many of us don’t. A return to making things by hand could be a route to that change, greater meaning and purpose, and a happier life.
All of A Sudden You’re There
We’re all going to leave this place. There’s nobody getting out alive, therefore, we have no option if we are to be happy in our work or any place else. So get into it, put the head down and the blinkers on…