WHO WE ARE (PART I): Mastering a Craft

To give our readers a better sense of us as people, we begin a series of posts on our cherished values.  We want you to know what matters most to each of us.  ROB starts with his ideas about CRAFT.

A few months ago, we looked back at our legal careers, asking what we would do differently, knowing what we know now.  I wrote of my regrets about not having done more to develop my trial lawyer abilities. I’ve come to see development of a craft – learning to do something really well -- as essential to human fulfillment.  It means doing something with real skill.  In my sunset years, I happen to have found something – writing -- for which I have great passion for learning to do well.   I’ve thought a lot about how to accomplish that.  So, what does it take to develop a craft?

Read. Study.

Before I started my legal studies, I asked a lot of lawyers for

advice about succeeding in law school.  Some of what I got was useful, some wasn’t worth the dinners and drinks I bought for those telling me to do this or that.  One helpful piece of advice I received came from a friend named Booker Morris, then a Texas Assistant Attorney General.  He said simply, “Read. Study.”  There was more to law school than that, of course, but following his admonition laid a great foundation.  I see no reason that rule doesn’t apply in most endeavors. 

So, as I work at being a writer, I inhale novels, memoirs, and non-fiction works that provide background for what I’m writing about.  Want to write a novel about a female Navy pilot?  Read the memoirs of the first women fighter pilots.  Want to write about a political career in a state where you’ve never lived?  Go on Amazon and buy books about the political history of that state. 

The reading and studying also must include the “how to” of the craft.  Browse Barnes & Noble or other bookstores and find works that teach writing, accounting, being a computer geek, etc.  In my present effort, each quarter I try to read at least one book on how to write.   

Seek and Accept Mentoring

Some people learn by doing, some learn from mentoring by others. Woodson, for example, recently related to Henry and me his experience as a teenager of learning welding from a

master welder through watching the man work and talking endlessly with him about how to improve.  In my life, I’ve had great mentors in each of the two things I put the most effort into learning.  Two wise and talented lawyers, Ed Clover and John Hill, both now deceased, taught me the practice of law.  What I didn’t learn is my fault, not theirs.

As I transition into a writing career, I’m being nurtured by a talented writing group in my church and by my novelist daughter.  She writes under the name Bianca Sloane and I know her now as “Coach Sloane” (check her out at www. Bianca Sloane.com).  Her sculpting of me as a writer brings home the importance of apprenticeship in learning a craft.  We all need someone to teach the rules of the road, help us avoid potholes, and understand when to slow to a crawl and when to rev it up and let ‘er rip.  Everyone needs a Coach Sloane and I’m incredibly fortunate to have mine.

 

The 10,000 Hour Rule

Regardless of reading and studying and regardless of mentoring, in the final analysis, success depends most on doing the craft.  I’m a great believer in Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule -- the suggestion advanced in his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success – that doing anything really well requires doing that thing for at least 10,000 hours.  I realize the number might be 8,000 and it might be 22,000.  The point Gladwell makes so well is that learning a craft requires repetition – doing something over and over again until you get it right.  Since I keep up with the time I put into writing, I know I don’t have my 10,000 hours in yet.  But, I’m working on it on a daily basis and I’ll get there.

I also have my own corollary to the 10,000 hour rule.  Developing a craft resembles playing a sport at a high level.  Great coaches – football’s Nick Saban, basketball’s late, great Pat Summitt, golf’s Butch Harmon – I think would all say that if you don’t enjoy the grind of practice, the odds are you’ll never be very good, let alone great, at your game.  In the writing context, if you don’t enjoy the grind of reading, drafting, and editing, then reading, re-drafting, and editing some more, you really ought to find something else to do.   

 

As I work daily at my new craft, I say to young people, old

people, and people in between, “Figure out what you want to do really well and work at doing that, remembering the old adage that success is a journey, not a destination.” One day, you might get to say to yourself, “Well done.”  Then, start again on getting better.  This is who I am.  This is my formula for a fulfilling life.