Zane Kenneth Claes - The Joy of Craft: A Paradoxical Approach for Learning to Do Things Well

The Joy of Craft

A Paradoxical Approach for Learning to Do Things Well

By Zane Kenneth Claes

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Copyright 2016 Zane Kenneth Claes

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Table of Contents

Endnotes

Each of us has an inner world. It dictates our actions in ways of which we are hardly aware. All your pain and happiness, boredom and fulfillment exist in this place. I do not know the shape of yours, but I know what it feels like. Navigating it can be confusing and lonely. Often you get where youre going only to realize that the destination was wrong. That new job, new car, and new you are not what you were searching for. We live our lives in the tension between reality and imagination. Between who we are and who we wish to be. Struggling with ourselves is the essence of the human condition. It is what makes us each the hero of our own story.

Are you on the right road for you? Not the most profitable path. Not the direction your parents planned. Not the one that society would call correct. The only journey worth taking is the one right for you.

It will not all be roses and sunshine. The idea of happiness is so fleeting because the exploration of this inner world is not the same for any two people. Prescriptive self-help books can offer a solution, but not the solution. Their maps will not match the territory of your mind.

Why, then, write a book about the inner world? I think there is a healthy approach to living, which has been lost in a deluge of get-rich-quick, easy-bake solutions to a complicated topic. It is not a complicated approach, but it is subtle. It doesnt sell seminars or pack auditoriums. But it works. Modern science has given us an unprecedented glimpse toward this secret landscape of our minds. While our journeys are each our own, were traveling down many of the same roads. Instead of pointing at specific waypoints, this book will explore how the roads are built. In the end, its not so much about which route you choose but how you choose it.

Along the way, well meet the many vexing characters of this landscape. Motivation and focus are but two, sometimes friends and sometimes enemies. Wrestling with them was one of my first forays into the field, because it was with an eye toward productivity that I first became intrigued with the subject of the mind. There are many more players; each of the emotions will make an appearance, at times seeking to forestall or encourage. As we share in this journey, the hardest thing to grapple with is the fact that there are no good guys and no bad guys. They are each a part of us, and we need to learn to share our world with them.

This is not a book that will prescribe. Instead, it will give you the tools to find your own path. It will point toward the features of the landscape and describe them. It will comment on commonalities our worlds might share, but the decision of which road to travel down rests with you. I hope that you will discover the joy in making these decisions and in crafting a life you wish to live.

To arrive at such a place, we must first begin by identifying the problems that plague our inner worlds. Every story needs an antagonist, after all.

When I was a teenager, I used to be amazed that some people would go to the same office and do the same job every day without any true sense of satisfaction. It wasnt simply that it was repetitive. Nor did I judge them for the lives they led. What I could not understand was the way they would talk about life. The dissatisfaction was palpable. Each new promotion or purchase was a veneer of success plastered hastily on a hollow foundation. When pressed, they could not come up with an answer to the question, Why? to satisfy even themselves. Why work? Money. Why money? Because, money. It was cyclical reasoning so myopic it made my young head spin.

This was a symptom of what I would later learned is called the hedonic treadmill by psychologists. Many people have been taught by society to use money as a proxy for happiness. A monetarily motivated person is perpetually dissatisfied, having bought into the belief that money is a good gauge of happiness. The truth is that there is no evidence to support this belief. When you probe deeply enough, you find that what were actually looking for is what money represents. Its the freedom to do what we want to do with our time. To pursue the dreams weve put off. We really want to have experiences, not money. Sadly, were deceived in believing that we must accrue the latter to obtain the former.

The pursuit of novel experiences is at the heart of living an enjoyable life, but we are diverted by the hedonic traps our own minds have laid for us. Its not our fault. The mind is evolutionarily programmed to be susceptible to these traps. This book is about finding those traps and plotting a course around them. It is about realizing that the barriers to having a good life and doing things well are not what we think they are.

Im getting ahead of myself. To explain what this book is, I should probably tell you where it comes from. When I was in college, I stumbled across the new discovery that the brain continued to grow on a physical level well into adulthooda process called neurogenesis . This newfound ability of adults was immensely exciting. Psychology was also entering into an uncharacteristically optimistic stage of development. The sciences of the mind had originally been developed to treat medical disorders. The advances of the twentieth century finally allowed them to turn their sights on helping healthy people. I became captivated by the process of consciously improving human learning. I read every book I could on foreign languages, education, neuroscience, and childhood development. I was fixated upon using these disciplines in combination with my computer science and game design background to create educational video games. I maintain a passion for the serious application of video games to this day, and this book contains a great deal of research that originated in this field. Interactive media, like games, have since become a preferred method of scientists for studying and improving the mind. My attempts to understand the process of learning led me to the quantified self movement, which seeks to capture data about every aspect of a persons life. From sleep to steps, nothing is beyond scrutiny in the name of self-improvement. Eventually, my interests dovetailed into anything mind related I could find. Philosophy, behavioral economics, and even religion all made their way onto my reading list. By my midtwenties I was reading every book on the subject of mind I could find. When my appetite was not yet satisfied I dove into the original scientific publications upon which the books were based.

These studies are limited in application by their nature. Studies are designed to test the abilities and restrictions of the human mind. They can show us where the boundaries are, probing at the edges of the psyche, but they cannot step inside the mind and look out. The collected publications of neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics form an outline of the internal world. In the map of the internal world, they can only roughly sketch the