Geoff turned me on to this remarkable series called “Made by Hand”, a Brooklyn-based film series covering the stories behind handmade objects and the people behind them.

The second short film in the series, follows knifemaker Joel Bukiewicz through his personal journey of becoming a craftsman. Like Geoff, I identified strongly with Joel’s story and took notes on a few themes that stood out to me.

“It doesn’t cost much to start – just time”

I’m a devout bootstrapper, for a lot of reasons including of my relationship with money. It’s not that I don’t have big ideas – believe me, I do – but I know that most of the time I can start with very, very little investment of cash and just a smart investment of my time.

“Cut yourself, burn yourself, fuck stuff up, you never make that mistake again”

While I’ve only bled once or twice for my work, I’ve felt the pain of a mistake. Mistakes are part of the learning process, so long as you’re learning from them and seeing the opportunity on the other side of the mistake.

“Once you become competent, maybe you have it in you to become an artist. Maybe you don’t.  Mastery is the 10,000 hours it takes to get to day one.  “

I’m still working on my 10,000 hours.

“…studios full of people just…doing shit that they loved to do. I didn’t realize that I could have a community – [...] it was like somebody turned the lights on.”

If it takes 10,000+ hours, why would you choose to do it alone once you knew there was an alternative?

The importance of a catalyst (Photographer for Edible Brooklyn)

Joel mentions the editor of Edible Brooklyn being the human catalyst for introducing him to the world outside his own door. Every success story contains this chapter. Every. Single. One. Who’s your catalyst? Who could you be a catalyst for?

“The currency is really rich in community [...] in friendships, doing what you want, quality of life.”

“Independence” isn’t much worth the effort if you’re doing it by yourself. Success doesn’t start – or stop – with wealth.

Being rich alone is still being alone.

“More than a community – a movement.”

It’s interesting to hear Joel describe a movement as another layer above “community”. It’s something I’ve said before but have always struggled to describe or qualify.

In Joel’s description, a “movement” describes larger changes that result in the converging of consumer & producer ecosystems. The textbooks define a “movement” as a coordinated group action towards a cause, but I don’t know if it’s always that deliberate.

“If there’s a movement, it’s in the future.”

This sentence was extremely resonant for me. In it’s essence, the idea that we’re not able to see these convergences around us as they’re happening…but we can see that they’re likely to happen.