Read a woodworking magazine or watch a TV show like the Woodsmith Shop and you're bound to come away feeling both inspired and embarrassed. It's entertaining and inspiring to see the pros complete projects efficiently -- almost magically -- or to read descriptions of their seemingly effortless excellence. But more often than not the reader or viewer is left with two impressions. The first is that the task is straightforward, even easy. The second impression is that the level of excellence the pros display is within everyone's grasp. When we try to replicate what they've done (and, being optimists, most of us do try) we find ourselves frustrated and disappointed. "Why can't I do that?" we ask ourselves. The anwser we don't want to hear is that we are simply less able, slow learners, inept, or clumsy.
Newer woodworkers are particularly suseptible to these confidence-sapping messages. In fact, the less experienced we are, the more likely it is that we'll attribute the excellence we observe to innate talent alone.
Here's my beef: A few critical details are missing in the accounts we see and read. The first is any sense that noone is born with the kind of skills displayed by the pros. The competence they possess is the result of years of effort, learning, and skill-building. We don't see the work that went into developing the skills; we see the results.
Second, nobody shows their mistakes -- the miscuts, the sloppy joint caused by a lapse of concentration, or the mismatched mortise and tenon that had to be shimmed or re-done. I'm not naive enough to believe that a pro would willingly display less than perfect work. But to convey the impression that every step associated with every project goes perfectly all the time is downright misleading. I think it would be a kindness to point out the sticking points that even the most skilled woodworkers confront. For example:
1. Readers or viewers could be forewarned that certain tasks will be challenging, especially if a person is new to them. "Expect to make a few miscuts," we might be advised. "Make the cuts on scrap a few times before touching your workpiece."
2. Fess up. When a task can't be mastered without making errors, say so. "It may look like this is simple, but it took me quite a few tries before I got it right -- and a lot of practice to reach the point where I was able to do this as easily as I just did." How refreshing and reassuring it would be to hear such a comment.
3. It would be kindness to point out the typical errors beginners make. For example, the pro might say, "You may find that you have trouble at this point. Almost everyone does. Even a slight error in your measurement will pretty much ruin this joint, so you need to take your time and double-check your measurement."
Such comments can be both reassuring and kind -- and can actually encourage those of us who are not professionals to persist even when frustrated. Pros without fragile egos or the need to prove themselves superior to "the rest of us" would be well-advised to humanize the process by which they make the building of beautiful objects look so simple.
