The Craftsman

by Richard Sennett

"A life without speech and without action is literally dead to the world."

all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices;

technical understanding develops through the powers of imagination.

motivation matters more than talent, and for a particular reason. The craftsman's desire for quality poses a motivational danger: the obsession with getting things perfectly right may deform the work

itself.

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen, I argue, due to our inability to organize obsession than be...

"I am my own maker."

the aspiration for quality will drive a craftsman to improve, to get better rather than get by.

competition has disabled and disheartened workers, and the craftsman's ethos of doing good work for its own sake is unrewarded or invisible.

skill is a trained practice.

workshop is: a productive space in which people deal face-to-face with issues of authority.

"I am my own maker,"

"Enlightenment is mankind's exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one's own understanding without the guidance of another.

Diderot believed boredom to be the most corrosive of all human sentiments, eroding the will

"The hand is the window on to the mind."'

believing in correctness drives technical improvement;

Heraclitus that "no man ever steps in the same river twice, because it is not the same river and not the same man."