Presenting two different ways to think about your career, ‘The Clarity of the Craftsman’ provides a refreshing adaptation to the traditional ‘How To Guide’ for eager final year students. Discarding the systematic and painfully rigid step-by-step advice on how to embark on a prosperous career path, this week’s reading highlights the ‘crucial’ benefits of adopting ‘the craftsman mindset’, a perspective founded on valuing what you can provide to your job, rather than what your job can provide to you.
With a clear intention to inspire young readers through a mix of motivational quotes, anecdotes and a first person format, this reading suggests that passion is not a natural occurrence in the workforce but rather, is something that emerges from the satisfaction experienced when being the ‘best’. Whilst I personally found little value in the writer’s choice to exemplify this concept through the achievements of a musician due to the innate skill that provides musicians with the founding abilities for success, the reading’s core focus on working towards continuous improvement and ‘becoming so good, they can’t ignore you’ is undeniably motivating.
However, despite the obvious aim to motivate readers I myself more engaged in to the ideas surrounding ‘clarity’ and ‘fulfillment’. Obtaining a secure sense of clarity towards job choice and career pathways is something that often feels frustratingly distant. Yet it had never occurred to me until now that perhaps this sense of clarity isn’t something that is instantly present or absent, but rather generated purely through the dedication to achieve clarity despite this.