Last night I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a glimpse into the obsessive nature of Jiro Ono, and his decades-long work of improving his craft of creating sushi.

I’ve been working in the startup world for a few years.* It fits me well, as someone who relentlessly looks forward, upward, and outward. But it also feels frenetic and chaotic. Prototype, build, pivot, raise, fail, grow, advise, fail, build, pivot, prototype, fail, pivot. If you’re not failing, you’re not ambitious enough, jump off of the cliff and assemble the airplane on the way down, and all that.

True craft seems different. Craft is about singular focus on the action at hand, from looking inward instead of outward. Mastery through dedication to repetition (or at least 99% repetition, 1% improvement). Day after day. Year after year. Decade after decade.

I wonder if there’s room for craft like this in my world. Because it feels like it’s missing, and I want something that Jiro and people like him seem to have.

Craft as side projects?

I’ve been doing some woodwork lately, and enjoy it. But even in building furniture, I fly forward to greater and grander things. The table above was my first project. In doing it, I made all kinds of impatient errors. I collapsed a work table (i.e. rotting desk) that was woefully inappropriate for the task. I bent the steel with a vice, zipties, and paper guides. I sanded when I should have planed. I had little concept of the proper tools to use, only the tools that made sense to me to get the job done. A craft approach would have slowed down, and learned the right tool use, and then repeat. Instead, I’m tackling a 7' dining room table, joining walnut from 42 board feet of stock, designing and welding legs (… and I don’t really know how to weld), carving butterfly joints, and so on. I shoot far above my level of competence because I want to get to the result, instead of learning the intricacies of the correct tools, their uses, and techniques. In Jiro’s world, I’d spend a year learning to sharpen my chisel before touching wood. In my version, I use a screwdriver because I can reach it quickly.

Craft in support tasks?

At AngelList I edited hundreds of entrepreneurs’ pitches. Through this Nivi was brutal, constantly spotting extra spaces, missing commas, and opportunities to rewrite. But in it he drilled into me a high standard for my writing, and an obsession with removing wasteful words. It left its mark: by the time I hit publish on this piece, I will have cut half of what I initially wrote, and rewritten everything else at least once. And that’s craftsmanship, I suppose.

There are opportunities for this all through our creating lives: contributing to product releases, running board meetings, listening to customers. It feels easier for more functional contributors like engineering, sales, design and so on, but even for the people in the middle who pull together the parts, there are opportunities for craftsmanship in our supporting work. But that’s peripheral, and certainly not the same as building this into our core work for decades.

Craft in fun?

The closest I regularly get seems to be in sport. I’ve been surfing off and on for a decade and a half. I’ve paddled out hundreds of times. And still, I suck.

Surfing has a limited number of actions you can do. Until you’re world class, it’s basically paddle, catch a wave, turn into the wave and carve. Seems simple, right? But it’s not. For me, it’s an endless series of attempts where I either fail or do only what I already know, punctuated by the rarest moments of progress. Like in craft, there’s a reference to help me understand how I’m improving. And like a craft, there’s also a focus on the tools: in the last year I’ve bought a different board, modified the fins, and experimented with traction, all in the goal of learning and improving. So maybe I’ll have to live out my need for craft through sports like surfing.

Does it matter?

I don’t feel like I have decades to give to something. I don’t think all of us have that temperament, or philosophy. And I think I’ll be fine if I’m not Jiro.

I don’t think I would trade the frenetic need to build, for a life of improvement through obsessive repetition. But I also miss it, and love the feeling of diving so deeply into something that progress seems to emerge only from that.