Official Luthiers Forum!

I just finished the latest David Epstein book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Mr. Epstein proposes the idea that cultivating range (versus the narrower/deep specialization so often seen in high-skill practitioners of a particular vocation) better prepares us for "...the wickedly unanticipated" as well as delays or prevents the sort of burn-out so often seen in those that try to cram that 10,000 hours of specialized training and practice into as few years as possible.

In the macro sense, late starters and those that enjoy walking a winding path would appear to have some distinct advantages over the long haul where engaged in a high skill craft or trade with lots of tangential and allied endeavors where skill sets overlap, but Mr. Epstein also seems to suggest that the judgement component of craft in those parallel activities might also be somewhat transferable. Hmm...

How does this specifically touch on our vocation or avocation? I'd like to think that there is some plausible reason for building and repairing a scattershot-like range of instruments versus specialization to just a few similar models, but wonder if the generalist approach might be more of a rationalization than reason (at least in my own case).

In any case, someone producing some cover for my apparent random walk through life is always welcome, particularly as a prelude to those lovely discussions with distant relatives over the holidays and those classmates unseen for the last 40 years that seem to pop up at class reunions!

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We have become a civilization that elevates idiots, prostitutes, and clowns. Am I still to defend it? Yes, for its principles. Yes, for what it was. Yes, for what it still may be.

-Mark Helprin, The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story (A Novel)

I sure hope it’s true. This is career number four for me, it’d be great if some portion of the first three came in handy at some point

I’ve also had 4 careers, superficially widely disparate in content. But, I’ve always thought they all use the same basic skills. And, for me, almost everything is interesting.

That said, people are wired differently. The generalist and the specialist may be different when born. Fortunately, there is room in the world for both. You’ve got to be who you are.

I left each of my earlier careers when it became apparent I’d reached the point where the only way forward was to settle down and specialise in some sub-aspect of the field. Never found any of them interesting enough to really want to do that. Now guitars, however …

Woodie, sounds like the guy espouses the old adage, "jack of all trades, master of none".

Personally, I've done a bunch of stuff and have a lot of interests - but by my early 20's I pretty much lived the 2 job life, guitar repair by day, tool & die work by night. I worked 2 or 3 jobs as a kid, so it was normal. Trying to retire is the weird gig for me....

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I have not read the book in question, but I firmly believe that some folks in this world (and I count myself, my wife and my daughter among them) who have what I call "high general competence." By that I mean: With the right amount of basic training and some experience, we really could do well at most things. When I was growing up, most young folks were encouraged to find our niche and build mastery. The problem with that way of thinking in today's world is that, with the rapid changes we are all experiencing, your mastery may be in a field that is rendered obsolete, or at least over-staffed. So, it is a good fortune to be a person of "high general competence," and be ready for whatever changes come along. Personally, I will make my living doing what I am doing right now until I retire or die, because my field is less prone to obsolescence (for the next 30 years, anyway), and it is a good living, but I will have fun doing any number of things that have absolutely no connection to how I make a living.

I am always fascinated by the fact that we (all of us) jump to thinking about our skills in terms of how we make money. We tend to think that someone who does a thing for a living is good at that thing, and when they do other things not for money, they must be less skilled at those other things. Hence, "professional" connotes expertise, and "amateur" connotes lower quality. There is certainly correlation, and that is understandable, but it is not universally true. There are people who stink at their jobs, but who excel at things they do for free. And there are people who excel at both, and who stink at both. I am trying, over time, to think about this differently and not assume anything about the competence of either a professional or an amateur until I see for myself how good they are at what they do.

My best earning job came after when I was interviewed and when he saw my list of jobs including shop assistant, delivery driver, paint sprayer, motor mechanic, chemical lab assistant, fork lift driver, etc, just said it meant I was very adaptable - got the job.
Did so well I was shown off to visiting clients with a list of my progress and many "specialities" in the oil field.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

It might depend on the person and could depend on a lot of things. I look at building in how I learn to play classical guitar which is repetition repetition repetition. The Suziki method of building. I know for me personally, for example, the more times I rout out the bindings the better I get at it. Of course in that process there are setbacks too or you could possibly get better tools for the job that add years to your work.

I have rambled my way through many vocations.

Not counting several "careers" -Tileman,Kitchen Designer/Salesman, General Contractor, Municipal Building Inspector that I needed to do to put food on the table for my wife and 7 kids.... I can't say I really "liked" (sometimes I hated them!) doing these things,they were just a means to an end.

The things I had a passion for were Carpentry,Antique restoration,furniture making cabinetmaking and millwork,Knifemaking,Leatherwork and of course Lutherie.

But at points I felt scattered and decided to concentrate on my true love of Guitarmaking.

Now that I am "Retired" I devote all my working days-usually 40 hours a week to Guitar making and Repair. Loving it!!

In my first real career as a mainframe computer system engineer/troubleshooter/analyst, problems were often very difficult to troubleshoot, and took everything from tracing hexadecimal code through "core dumps" to oscilloscopes and "B size prints" (schematics) to get to the heart of problems. You had to be part programmer, part electronics technician, and part diplomat to work through problems when you worked in the field in those days--many of the biggest problems had to do with the customer moreso than the system. Best job I'll have ever had. It was very challenging, but a total blast for a young guy. Couldn't do it today...

Anyway, those of us who worked out in the field were by necessity generalists, but with skills in certain specialties as well. There were times that we had problems we couldn't figure out and we had to bring in the pros from the factories/labs where they developed these systems. The specialists would come in, and eventually figure the problem out (though not always immediately--made us feel a little better. Techies hate to ask for help). Several times though, I'd comment to these specialists about how I envied their knowledge and ability to solve really difficult problems. Almost always I'd receive the reply that the specialists were actually envious of us. Their business was within such a narrow focus, that of course they'd get good at it. They were envious that we generalists could deal with such a wide range of problems effectively.

There's ample room for both generalists and specialists in this world, and both are equally important.

As a sidenote, I got into computers for a living as a direct result of building and repairing guitars and amps. I was out of college, building and repairing guitars and amps, but also landscaping to eke out a living. Decided to go into electronics (due to my amplifier interest), and that morphed into computer hardware which morphed into computer systems in general.

Dave

After a youth misspent in dark rooms messing with computers and causing a ruckus on the POTS (prior to the advent of a publicly accessible internet) all I knew leaving high school was that whatever I did for a living, I didn’t want it to have anything to do with computers.

It took all of 18 months before I was working full time in the tech industry. I got out soon afterwards but always seemed to end up back in field or at least in a tangentially related field. Path of least resistance, I guess. 20 years on, I hope that this time I have escaped entirely

I think Leonardo DaVinci would have agreed with you Woodie.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

I started college, coming out of high school, taking civil engineering but got distracted along the way and dropped out after my third year. I went out into the world and spent 10 years doing "real work" including homesteading, machining, carpentry, and surveying. Then I went back to school and finished a couple of engineering degrees to be a specialist in environmental remediation. I can't tell you how many times the skills I learned during those 10 years saved the day.

Not every problem can be solved with just a hammer. It is much better to have a full tool belt.

I haven't read the book either, but now it's on my list.

I consider myself fortunate with having worn many hats before the start of my "real" career in machine design. I was also lucky to fall into an engineering environment in Silicon Valley where having multiple competencies was valued and even nurtured. One of the reasons I'd gotten that job was that, having been a car mechanic years before, I could "fix stuff," in the words of my boss. Some people I worked with went deep into their fields, in narrow specializations, so brilliant at what they did I thought of them as wizards and savants, but outside of their areas of expertise, many of them were nearly helpless. They were sometimes immersed in the depths of their specializations to the extent they lacked real world common sense, like absent-minded professors. Some were so committed to their work they seemed to have nothing else in their lives. But we needed them for the deep work, and they needed us for the general work, and the good managers knew how to leverage that mix.

If it hadn't been for my generalist leanings, I would never have attempted building guitars, and look at all the fun I would have missed out on.

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

I do like the idea of accumulating skills and experience along the way, but wonder about bumping up against that other notion of being limited to excellence at 2.5 things, with the 0.5 being something where proficiency is slowly being lost or gained. Those two concepts of 10,000 hours of practice to achieve excellence and a limit of simultaneously achieving true excellence in complex tasks of just two seem to bound human performance for the merely mortal.

There is also the observation that excellence is fleeting in some people, while persistent in others. While I was not at Greenridge long enough to observe the arc of performance in other local repairers and builders, it was not uncommon to hear comments on instruments coming in for re-repair or re-setup along the lines of "...such a shame... he/she (the repairer) used to be reliably good." Is too broad a range of interests ultimately detrimental to maintaining both high skill level and focus in a primary field, or is burnout the primary determiner of longevity of skills?

On second thought, perhaps we should get back to less contentious subjects such as hide glue and neck joints.

These sorts of distressing thoughts are what you get when up since 1 AM! On the plus side, my house is now very clean and outfits chosen for the niece's weekend wedding!

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We have become a civilization that elevates idiots, prostitutes, and clowns. Am I still to defend it? Yes, for its principles. Yes, for what it was. Yes, for what it still may be.

-Mark Helprin, The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story (A Novel)

Burnout is a real thing, for sure. I often see instruments worked on recently by other local repairers. Most with many more years of experience than a rookie like me, and stellar reputations.

In some few cases their prior work is less than ideal, and l I have had to rectify it.

It could be burnout-related. Maybe the human mind can only tolerate hearing the phrase “low action without buzz” a certain number of times before descending into madness

I think in some cases it could be the fact that these highly-regarded folks end up with big backlogs and consequently under huge time pressure. It’s certainly the case around here. Perhaps deadlines slip. Frustrated clients are blowing up the phone day and night. Maybe the occasional shortcut is taken.

I think becoming a “victim of your own success” in this manner is a common failure mode of the skilled luthier. The longer you do great work, the greater the risk becomes…

For me personally I would take a step even further back and say that I was lucky enough to have a father that used to do absolutely everything his self and had me tag along. From fixing cars, building home additions, building a fireplace, using chain saws and so on and on and on. Also as a child you learn a lot about how the world works just walking up a stream and flipping over rocks to see what's under them. All those early stage developments help build a foundation of understanding for anything you want to try an accomplish in the future. That I think is the true sign of intelligence, being able to solve problems by manipulating all the little ideas and experiences that you had in the past even if they are not related to the task at hand. You may have observed how a stick floats downstream and apply that knowledge to something very different. It's something that, so far anyway, AI seems will never get right. But I digress

Starting off with a well rounded experience helps one focus in on a more narrow once.