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re are two types of people in the world: those who like to divide human behavior into one of two distinct groups, and those who don’t. This can help us decide right from wrong, pleasant from distasteful, or fun from drudgery, but it usually turns into a way to separate “Us” from “Them.” Naturally we are better than they are in some fashion. When it comes to woodworking, this sort of thinking appears all too often, and it does a lot of harm, both to individual woodworkers and to the craft as a whole.
For any given task there are different ways of doing things and each of us has a unique set of goals, experience and resources. For the most part, these are all practical matters, and I think it’s quite a stretch when anyone introduces any sort of moral or intellectual superiority into the equation. It may be human nature to justify why I do things the way I do, but it should be enough to say “that’s the way I like to do it, it doesn’t matter how you do it.” At the first Woodworking in America conference, Frank Klausz was asked why he used a pencil instead of a knife when he did his dovetail layout. Frank answered “I use a pencil” and moved on.
There are many ways to learn how to do things. You can read everything you can, you can spend time with people who have done what you want to learn for a long time, or you can experiment on your own. No matter what your initial approach is, the only one that really counts is the last. If you haven’t explored the possibilities, you don’t know what the difference really is between one or another. If you’ve settled on a method because someone else said so, or taught you that it was the one true way, you will never be sure that it is the right method for you. I once heard Brian Boggs begin a presentation by advising his audience not to take his word for anything, to try the techniques he suggested and see how they worked. Brian may seem to be coming at woodworking from the opposite direction than Frank does, but the message is essentially the same: Turn theory into experience and discover what works for you.
In the last couple of years I’ve seen a new phrase introduced in discussions of woodworking, “process oriented.” Phrases like that make my head spin and my nose twitch, especially when the statement “I’m into the process” is followed by “the results don’t really matter.” It immediately raises two questions for me. Who isn’t “process oriented?” And why exert the effort to make something if the results don’t matter? You can’t do anything, from building a rocket ship to sitting on the couch watching TV, without deciding on a process. You may prefer hiking to the top of a mountain rather than driving or riding a ski lift, but if you don’t want to get to the top, you’re just wandering around aimlessly. If that makes you happy, that’s OK. Each one of us gets to choose the course we take and how we get there. Along the way, we’ll meet folks who try to convince us that shoveling manure is enjoyable and rewarding if we get the right kind of shovel and stand just so. We’re all free to take that advice or not.
