As Crawford describes in his 2009 ode to the trades, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he quit his job as a Washington, D.C., think tank director to open a motorcycle repair shop exactly to escape this bewilderment. The feeling of taking a broken machine, struggling with it, then eventually enjoying a tangible indication that he had succeeded (the bike driving out of the shop under its own power) provides a concrete sense of accomplishment he struggled to replicate when his day revolved vaguely around reports and communications strategies.
