“Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.” —Julius Erving, aka Dr. J, professional basketball player/legend.
We’re in the midst of a pandemic. Life has been...weird. As I have written elsewhere, I have faced challenges over the past year separate and apart from anything Covid-19 related. And the past 2 months have been super busy in the shop. As pandemic restrictions decrease and we start to reopen, stores and restaurants are also opening (for the first time) and they want their furniture. Some projects were on hold, some are new, but they are all due sooner than you would think. As a business owner, it’s a blessing and I’m grateful for it.
Also, I feel compelled to share some other thoughts about this. Namely, as a professional, this is my job. And there are many people who have told me directly, or whose spouses have told me when their partners were out of ear shot, “s/he would love to do what you’re doing—make stuff professionally.” I have mixed feelings about this which I have shared with those who have asked; but, I think it important to share here how it is I made the decision to pursue my craft, and also give space to some new revelations.
First, I had (and still maintain a part time commitment to) a very good federal government job. When I decided back in 2010-11 that I eventually wanted to build things full time, I started down a path of semi-financial independence wherein we paid off our house and lived frugally (check out www.mrmoneymustache for tips). I had a base of clients and a decent retail line in place before I became at all dependent on my craft for money.
The other thing I did was a tip I learned from Daniel Gilbert’s book, Stumbling on Happiness (which I found as an audiobook on CD at a street sale in Baltimore nearly 20 years ago.) Gilbert is a psychologist who argues that we are very bad predictors of our future happiness/selves. So making big changes in our life based on how we think we will feel about the new lifestyle is ill-advised. Instead, he suggests we find other people who have done similar things and ask them how they feel, what they would do differently, what they recommend, etc. I have to say that I got such incredible and generous responses from, in some cases, complete strangers. I do not want to list my informal advisors here because I chose/found them for me and I think each of us should stumble upon our own for personal resonance. Plus, it’s part of the fun. This aside, I don’t know that they would necessarily want to be publicly highlighted.
But you might ask, how did I find them? Well, the universe can be uncanny sometimes. One very generous, talented craftsman was featured in a major city paper one day and that story ended up in my google news feed. Our lives/stories had so many similarities that I felt compelled to reach out. He responded with pages of good advice and insight and even audited my Instagram feed. Another craftsperson was mentioned off-handedly in a book I was reading as an engineer who quit his job to make furniture full time. I found an email and cold-called with a few specific questions. The next day, another email with a ton of great info.
The one direct recommendation I will make is Nancy Hiller’s book, Making Things Work. Nancy is an incredible furniture maker, scholar, admirer of nature, writer, and an overall excellent human being. The book chronicles her life as a woodworker and the challenges/problems she faces. It takes the shine off any romantic ideas you might have of a working life that consists solely of listening to your favorite albums loudly while watching the crisp shavings float off a walnut board in your shop. No. You have clients and they can be squirrely. You have bills. You have problems (“It’s all problems”).
I thought a lot about this book and the quote which I used to open this entry this past week. I started a job late last week that is pretty simple. I am teamed up with another maker to build out a restaurant with tables and benches. He is making the metal bases; I am making the wooden tops. The tops are 6/4 Oak (that’s roughly 1.5” for any non-wood nerds). The delivery truck dropped a pallet on the sidewalk outside my house in D.C. at 9:30 am. I spent an hour carefully inspecting and restacking the wood in my basement. I sweated through my shirt. Twice. After an afternoon of finishing up other jobs, I started milling some of the boards. If you have never pushed 6 foot length of solid oak across a jointer 4-5 times, then repeated the process 10 times, you just haven’t lived, my friend. And by lived I mean, had a total body workout at work that will give you what my friend Will used to call “no shower arms”...as in, your arms are so tired you can’t lift them to wash your hair in the shower.
The deadlines/coordination of the job, combined with the volume and my small shop space means I need to work quickly and steadily. So, I worked through the weekend. My hands/forearms are tired. My feet are tired. And my shoulders are fatigued. While I was restacking all those oak boards from the pallet (which by the way are 12’ long and probably 75lbs or so) I thought to myself, “this is silly. Your shop is too small for this job. You should slow down. You should avoid commercial jobs—it’s too stressful.” But then I went to the shop with one of the boards in hand. I milled it to see what it would look like. It’s gorgeous...and oak is maybe the nicest smelling wood you can have in the shop. And as soon as I saw that freshly milled wood, I was right back on track, knowing I was doing the right work. That doesn’t mean I’m not still tired. And that I should be updating my bookkeeping rather than writing a blog post. And that I will need a solid 15 minutes of stretching before work today. But it still feels right.
