Owner vs. Assembler

Once upon a time a cobbler toiled away in his workshop to build a pair of shoes. He owned the process from start to finish, from picking the leather to lacing the grommets.

Then Henry Ford came along and messed everything up. He showed the world that if you divvy up the tasks and train workers to be specialized, you end up with a much more efficient system--a system we know as the assembly line.

Assembly lines are much more productive than cobblers.

And shoes were never made the same way again.

That’s too bad, we might think, for the cobbler was a craftsman, an artist. He owned his work in a way that an assembler could never do.

And you would be right, except for the fact that the cobbler is a lie. He may exist that way in our minds, but the reality is such a cobbler never existed.

You see, cobblers need others too. The cobbler likely did not make the leather he used for his shoes; he bought it from a tannery. He likely did not make the string he used for the laces or the rubber he used for the soles. It’s much more likely that he purchased these raw materials from others. But let’s just say he didn’t buy them; he made everything from the ground up. Well, did he make the ground too?

My point is that we are always and have always been collaborators. And we need not lose the romance of the cobbler simply because we find ourselves as members of a team, members whose own jobs may seem like very small parts of the process as a whole.

We may not feel very much like that old, creative cobbler at all.

But we can. We can own the part of the process that is ours. We can do our piece of the work creatively, as if we are offering a gift to the world. We need not view ourselves as cogs in the machine, for our part in the process, while limited (how could it be otherwise?), is at least potentially beautiful and valuable.

Own your work like a true craftsman today.