Artisans

Artisans

Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more "efficiency" out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.

Artisans have their soul in the game.

Primo, artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial. Secundo, they have some type of "art" in their profession; they stay away from most aspects of industrialization; they combine art and business. Tertio, they put some soul in their work: they would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because it hurts their pride. Finally, they have sacred taboos, things they would not do even if it markedly increased profitability.

Compendiaria res improbitas, virtusque tarda—the villainous takes the short road, virtue the longer one. In other words, cutting corners is dishonest.

Let me illustrate with my own profession. It is easy to see that a writer is effectively an artisan: book sales are not the end motive, only a secondary target (even then). You preserve some sanctity of the product with strong prohibitions. For instance, in the early 2000s, the writer Fay Weldon was paid by the jewelry chain Bulgari to advertise their brand by weaving recommendations for their great products into the plot of her novel. A nightmare ensued; there was a generalized feeling of disgust on the part of the literary community.

I also recall in the 1980s some people trying to give away books for free, but with advertisements in the midst of the text, as with magazines. The project failed.

Nor do we industrialize writing. You would be disappointed if I hired a group of writers to "help" as it would be more efficient. Some authors, such as Jerzy Kosinski, have tried to write books by subcontracting sections, leading to a complete ostracism after the discovery. Few of those writers-cum-contractors have seen their work survive. But there are exceptions, such as Alexandre Dumas père who was said to run a workshop of ghostwriters (forty-five), which allowed him to scale his production up to one hundred and fifty novels, with the joke that he read some of his own books. But in general, output is not scalable (even if the sales of a book are). Dumas may be the exception that confirms the rule.

Now, something very practical. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received was the recommendation by a very successful (and happy) older entrepreneur, Yossi Vardi, to have no assistant. The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering—and its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way. (By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities). This is a via negativa approach: you want maximal free time, not maximal activity, and you can assess your own "success" according to such metric. Otherwise, you end up assisting your assistants, or being forced to "explain" how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself. In fact, beyond my writing and research life, this has proved to be great financial advice as I am freer, more nimble, and have a very high benchmark for doing something, while my peers have their days filled with unnecessary "meetings" and unnecessary correspondence.

Having an assistant (except for the strictly necessary) removes your soul from the game.

Think of the effect of using a handheld translator on your next trip to Mexico in place of acquiring a robust vocabulary in Spanish by contact with locals. Assistance moves you one step away from authenticity.

Academics can be artisans. Even those economists who, misunderstanding Adam Smith, claim that humans are here to "seek maximization" of their income, express these ideas for free, and boast to not be into lowly commercial profit seeking, not seeing the contradiction.