The Craftsmanpreneur

This is going to be reductive, but hang in there

You don’t have to watch the video, but I think it’s great anyway.

This is Akira Nakai, and this might be some of the most niche business ever: he makes a specific kind of widebody kit for a specific brand of car, but not even all of them - just specific years and models.

He meets you, he gets to know you, and then he builds the thing you didn’t even know you’d love the most. Every single car is different.

As far as I’m concerned he is an artist and a craftsman of the highest degree.

You’ve probably never heard of him.

If we talk in terms of the global population, no one has.

But there is this tiny, strong cult following of every car he makes. Every owner who has one of his cars is tied together in some way, they have meets all over the world and he’s brought them together through his craft. So, he is sort of a legend in his own right. Albeit the smallest and most potent kind.

I don’t know. I admire that a lot.

Everyone wants to be Bill Gates or the next Steve or Zuck or Jeff or Musk.

But really, I just want to be something like the next Nakai.

Maybe not in Porsches, or even cars at all. But just that kind of craftsman.

If you’ve been following for a while you know I’ve been thinking on this for a while, probably years now. It’s that great youthful despair of not knowing what the heck you’re supposed to be doing.

I’m pretty okay with not knowing, by the way, but the pragmatic part of me insists I roll it over and over in my brain to find a plan out of it, like your tongue keeps probing new dentistry as if that’ll somehow change your mouth.

The useful opposite, of course, of not knowing what you want is knowing what you don’t want.

Derek Sivers says this repeatedly and I like it every time: he sold his company and donated the 22 million to charity because he didn’t want to IPO, he didn’t want the responsibility of investors and trying to make more money for their sake. He saw it as money in exchange for stress and unhappiness, so he chose to do the unpopular (entrepreneurially) thing but ultimately the happier one and just… didn’t.

He didn’t pursue the money for its own sake.

And so there’s perhaps a parallel there, even if the guys couldn’t be much more different themselves. There’s an authenticity or something about it.

There’s two structures, the way I see it:

The first is entrepreneurial and that is a growth model. You start out as the guy doing the business yourself until eventually you can afford to pay other people to do the business for you and they hire people and so on and so on until you’re the CEO of a sprawling company. This is growth.

Then there’s the rockstar model, which is that you can’t really sub contract your performances. Being the best guitar player doesn’t mean you become the manager of other guitar players. You can just be the head of the guitars department in a corner office. Mick Jagger has been singing his same own songs for what, 120 years now?

The sales model for both methods is different entirely, and I’d love to talk more about these two as businesses but for the moment the point really is just that I think I’d like to be the guy on the ground making the stuff myself the whole time. This comes back to the Nakai v. Bezos thing.

He says he builds each car as if it was his own. He honestly just loves them and his clients are people he’s trying to sell to, they’re the people who ask for his help making these pieces of art. His method for self sustaining is just having people continue to love his work and let him do it to their cars.

“I build these cars for my self satisfaction. People around the world just seem to like what I do.” he calls it a hobby. Just, you know, a hobby you do all day every day and it pays you and takes you around the world. Hmmm…

Find your craft and let it kill you.