Work in Progress : Skill, Craft and Meaning

We learn, apply and master creative work throughout our lives. I use the term ‘creative work’ very broadly to mean any activity or discipline that has an element of learned proficiency and an aspect of open-endedness to its outcome. This includes but is not limited to the arts, scientific research and any vocation within the knowledge economy in general. Generally, to succeed in one of these fields you need to acquire skills and learn the craft of the discipline. These words skill and craft are often used interchangeably but are not synonymous, and in this case, I use them to mean two distinct aspects of creative work. 

Skill is proficiency in the technical aspects of the discipline - a combination of natural talent and learning through practice. A musician’s ability to hit the right notes again and again in the correct rhythm; a scientists’ ability to evaluate existing knowledge and carefully design experiments to push the boundaries - that’s skill - acquired through a combination of hard work and natural ability. 

Craft on the other hand, is the ability to mold and present the work done by your skill in a manner that’s conducive to consumption in the world. Craft becomes the necessary partner of skill whenever the work in question meets the outside world. Staying with the musician, her ability to know how best to assemble and package a musical piece - that’s craft. The poet, while channeling his emotions, is also keenly aware of the exact words he uses to express it keeping in mind his readers, and the entrepreneur with the most inspired business plan knows that it is useless unless she is able to raise money to implement it at scale. Craft is essential for skills to work in the real world. 

There are obviously gradations of relative importance of these two aspects in various fields and this is really important for day-to-day satisfaction in one’s work. Sports can be thought of as being on one end of the spectrum - where outcomes are almost entirely dictated by skill. The top three tennis players in the world are likely the best in the world at tennis. At the next level would be disciplines such as performing arts and scientific research. Both are largely skill-driven, although there is the occasional exception where craft overshadows skill. Think of TV and movie stars who are successful more on the back of their larger-than-life personas and mannerisms than acting skills. At the other end of the spectrum is politics. The job of a politician is to broker compromises among the conflicting needs of people - in that sense it is creative work within the broad purview of the definition I proposed above. Getting elected to do that work is actually the craft, akin to acquiring funding to do the scientific research you are skilled at. Yet, the field of politics is dominated by focus on the machinery to win elections, not on the work that’s the core of a politician’s job. 

I find it useful to think about work in these terms to identify areas of course-correction as an individual and at the level of the whole field. Generally, for a highly skilled person, it is necessary to learn some essential crafts of the trade, even though they may not think it to be important. As a field, for the most part, it is true to say that we want skills to be rewarded and remain more important than the craft, that is, for the discipline to be skill-centric. 

Day-to-day satisfaction will generally be good in a skill-centric line of work in which you’ve honed your skills and are willing to learn the craft over time. But mastering both still does not guarantee long-term fulfillment - this is where the often-vague term ‘meaning’ comes into picture. Meaning is the distillation of a long-term purpose and implications of the work in question. Meaning can be obfuscated by a disbalance of skills and craft, as in the case of politics, a mismatch between the skills required and one’s own inclinations, but it is an essential aspect of work that one ultimately finds worth doing. At the intersection of purposeful work, trained skills and learned craft, lies the path to an invigorating worklife.