Furniture Making As Self-Making
In his new book The Way of Excellence, Brad Stulberg explores the many potential upsides of pursuing excellence—whether it’s mastering an instrument, honing a craft, perfecting a golf swing, or broadening your abilities as an artist, athlete, entrepreneur, leader, parent, partner, or friend. There‘s plenty to be gained: money, recognition, validation, influence, meaningful relationships. But perhaps the most compelling motive, Stulberg points out, is not what you might achieve, but who you might become. He tells the story of the furniture maker Peter Korn, who, seventeen years into his career, attended a woodworking seminar where the group was tasked with composing “personal artist mission statements,” with the prompt to consider how their work shaped who they were outside of it. Having never really considered his work in those terms, the artist’s statement Korn eventually came up with surprised him. For seventeen years, “I had been imagining that my goal was to make furniture that expressed certain values. Now I saw that what I had really wanted all along was to cultivate these same qualities within myself…that the primary motive for working is self-transformation.” After long imagining he was simply making furniture, there he was realizing the furniture was making him—making his “character,” Stulberg writes, “which comes from the Greek charassein, meaning ‘to engrave or stamp upon.’”
That our efforts and pursuits engrave and stamp upon us the qualities that make us us—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
It Doesn’t Get Inside You. It Doesn’t Impress Itself Upon You. It Doesn’t Change You.
The allure of a large language model like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is that it can process information, create content, generate ideas, and research topics in almost no time with almost no user effort. “Few have thought through the costs that will impose,” Ezra Klein writes in Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind. “Even if those summaries and drafts are pretty good, something is lost in the outsourcing.” Mainly, the things that can be engraved and stamped upon us only through processing information, creating content, generating ideas, and researching topics ourselves. “Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book,” Klein said elsewhere, “is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had. And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you.”
The Neuroscience Of Taxi Drivers
After learning that animals that bury food to retrieve it later grow bigger hippocampi—a key memory region in the brain—than their non-burying counterparts, the neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire wondered if something similar happens to humans. To find out, Maguire began studying London taxi drivers. To get licensed, drivers spend three to four years memorizing 25,000 streets and countless landmarks in preparation for “The Knowledge,” widely considered the most difficult test in the world. Unlike the relatively intuitive grid patterns of many North American cities, London’s layout is sprawling, irregular, and hard to commit to memory. And so, Maguire used brain imaging to compare the brains of licensed taxi drivers to those of non-drivers of similar age, education, and intelligence. Like those food-burying animals, the licensed drivers had larger hippocampi. And the longer they’d been on the job, the larger that area seemed to be. But, Maguire thought, what if the profession self-selects for people with a certain kind of brain? What if those licensed drivers had larger hippocampi all along? So she ran a second study—this time recruiting a group of trainees before they started “The Knowledge” training, along with a separate group of non-drivers. Before training began, she conducted MRI scans and memory tests on all participants. Four years later, she repeated the tests—and the trainees’ hippocampi had grown. Separate from Maguire’s work, other studies have found similar evidence that doing something repeatedly over time can lead to lasting, structural changes in the brain. Imaging studies of symphony musicians, for instance, have shown an unusually large Broca’s area—a region linked to language—while ballet dancers have shown brain adaptations that help them resist dizziness, with those changes growing more pronounced the longer they’ve danced. “There is a capacity for local plastic change in the structure of the healthy adult human brain in response to environmental demands,” Maguire writes in one paper. “We conclude,” she writes in another, “that specific, enduring, structural brain changes in adult humans can be induced by biologically relevant behaviors.”
You’re Becoming Incredibly Good At Whoever You Are In The Hours Of The Day
One lesson from Maguire’s work and the growing body of similar research is that what we are worked on by what we work on. “You are harvesting your identity in whatever it is you’re dedicating yourself to in the hours of the day,” as the poet David Whyte puts it. “It’s not a passive process to work. You’re shaping an identity. It’s like practicing.” If you were to practice an instrument for 8, 9, 10, 11 hours a day, even if you had little natural ability, you would become incredibly good at the clarinet, the piano, the saxophone. “So you’re becoming incredibly good at whoever you’re practicing at being in the hours of the day,” Whyte continues. “[Ask yourself], by the way I am in my every day, who am I practicing at becoming? Do I actually want to become that person?”
The Project Is You
Asked what he would focus on if he were to teach a writing class, the great essayist Henrik Karlsson said, “Becoming a person who writes well. Writing is not really about having a technical skill set. It’s deeper than that…Figuring out grammar and adverbs or whatever—that is kind of easy. The hard part is working to become a person who can think interesting thoughts.” That is the work he is primarily focused on in his own life. “The project I’m doing,” Henrik said in another interview, “is basically turning myself into a certain type of person who is able to have the thoughts that turn into essays. The work is growing intellectually and emotionally. It’s reading. It’s talking to people. It’s going out into the world and experiencing things. Cultivating the kind of mind that can have interesting thoughts—that’s the real work. And the essays are just the exhaust from that process.” That process of engraving and stamping upon yourself the qualities of a person who writes well.
For Use Can Change The Stamp Of Nature
“We’re all fairly malleable,” the actor Jeremy Strong said, ”which I’ve always been fascinated by: just the plasticity of identity. There’s a line in Hamlet where he says, ‘For use can almost change the stamp of nature.’ And I think as an actor, what I’m doing every time I prepare for a character—Irving Graff [Armageddon Time], Kendall Roy [Succession], Jerry Rubin [The Trial of the Chicago 7]—I’m trying to change the stamp of my nature. And you do that, just like we all do, through use, through habit, through work.” Ask yourself, in the habits, the work, the efforts and pursuits you’re dedicating yourself to in the hours of the day, what qualities are you practicing, cultivating, reinforcing? Do you actually want those qualities to get inside you? To be engraved and stamped upon your character, your identity, your nature? To make you you?