Learn to make

The marketeer (of common sense?!) Seth Godin writes about learning to make in The Icarus Deception (a title first published in 2012).

It’s an attitude I like to think I have held through my life and despite the initial statement (quoted below) being weighted by a computer-based process – that not everybody will have access to, or even want to do – its overall essence is still relevant and advice worth taking, whatever your abilities (and always preferable to be a non-digital (non-typing!) dexterous task).

It isn’t necessarily (certainly starting out) how good you are at making whatever you choose to make, it’s about the understanding, attitude and appreciation that the process, skill and ownership of making, like fixing, can give you (even in a basic way so as to better appreciate what colleagues in different trades do, for instance) and the revealing of (new) ideas, attitudes and methods through those undertakings that can potentially assist in the breaking of your own assumptions, prejudices and barriers, enabling and empowering better ways to understand and appreciate what things take to make.

Everyone should learn to code.

Not because we have a tremendous shortage of people who can produce things in [insert the name of your favorite hot programming language here] but because once you know how to make something, it changes how you see things. Once you know how to set lead type, typography looks different. Once you know how to assemble an electronic device, every computer seems a bit less mysterious. Once you know how to give a speech, you see things in the speeches others give.

Learning how to make things turns you from a spectator into a participant, from someone at the mercy of the system to someone who is helping to run the system.

Learning how to make gives you the guts to make more, to fail more often, to get better at making.

Seth Godin The Icarus Deception

And, certainly learning to code (and even just preparing and assembling HTML) presents and helps reveal a world of logic that while seeming unrelated to the wider world can help break down (personal) attitudes, judgements and assumptions of how things could, can and even should be done for their directness and, most times, efficiencies gained from less self-justifying management and bureaucracy – simpler approaches and methods that often show and prove that top-down suggestions and involvement aren’t necessary to achieving results.

Also, just don’t – certainly professionally – walk into a trade thinking you might know the ins and outs of it (invariably because of the access to and ease of use of a lot of computer software these days) after giving the making of something a go, whatever the trade is, and assuming your approach is the answer.

That doesn't help anyone, least of all yourself and certainly if sought without a prior discussion and agreement of that approach being taken nor help in the perception and presentation stakes and invariably riles the recipient(s) of that ‘work’ and demeans their feelings of point and worth and the educative and professional endeavours and routes they’ve already taken to be in the position they’re in to receive so say ‘help and guidance’ from an outsider.