Sunday Soliloquy – Craftsmanship

On Thursday this week I attended LincUpLive, “Tomorrow’s Business Innovation, growth and regeneration – a business intelligence event”. I have lots of highlights of the day, which was very motivating and gave me a lot to think about.

One thing that really struck a cord with me was something that Alan Moore said during his keynote on The Radical Redesign of Business. He made a point about the idea of craftsmanship, and how you cannot become a master at anything instantly.

Alan said:

You don’t become a master craftsman by getting it right first time. You try, fail, learn and move on. Try, fail, learn and move on again. Eventually you get it. And then you are good. But you still try, fail, learn and move on. That is how you stay at the top of your game.

He is absolutely spot on. It is true for anything and everything – in our personal lives and our business lives. In order to become good at something, in order to be recognised for something, we must try it, fail at it, learn from our trying, and move on. Without the failure and learning we do not improve. We must be willing to try and fail, and ready to learn from our mistakes, in order to achieve. In fact, we must plan into our expectations and even schedules that we will not get it right first time, and we will need to go back and try again, maybe even a few times. And once we feel like we have mastered whatever it is we are doing, once we have practised so much we have mastered our craft, we must continue to try, fail, learn and move on or we will lose those skills we spent so long developing.

Oh, and as a bonus thought today how about this quote, also from Alan:

When people have ugly thoughts, only ugly deeds seem to come out of those thoughts. We should strive for happy beautiful thoughts so we can be happy and beautiful.

Life is all about the journey. Try, fail, learn and move on.