There once was a carpenter. He loved his craft in all ways. He loved the feeling of a chisel in his hand. The smell of fresh cut wood as his saw ran through the grain. Taking something raw and unformed and painstakingly, lovingly, applying his own mastery to produce something meaningful.
His hands showed the mark of his love. Calloused, rough and cut. He would often look at his hands, and feel that he had chosen his craft well. His is work kept him strong. His hands were a part of who he was, a mark of a man who worked real things into the world.
His hands made cradles for beloved children. Rocking chairs for old couples to live out their twilight years. Dressers, tables, cabinets, all that would stand the test of time, being passed down to his customers children, and their children.
But he also loved the people. They would come to him and tell him what they wanted, what they needed. He had seen every kind of furniture under the sun, and could help turn an unformed idea into the perfect fit for them. The feeling when he handed over his work to his customers was unmatched.
He lived in a golden age of carpentry. The craft had been refined by his predecessors, and his peers were refining it still. All of the tools he needed were at hand. All of the methodology and information he needed was at his fingertips. Thanks to the modern age, he could work quickly without sacrificing his standards.
The feeling of delivering that end product came more and more quickly as he continued to master his craft.
Then, one day, a salesman came to his workshop, and tried to sell him about a machine. He claimed this machine could create any piece of furniture you could imagine. You just put wood in on one end, tell it what you wanted, and just a few minutes later, out pops the furniture.
The man tried the machine. It was horrible. The end result was garbled, practically useless. The salesman told him that soon, all furniture would be made this way. The carpenter laughed and told him to peddle his wares elsewhere.
But the machine was spreading. More and more he saw furniture that was clearly made by this new kind of machine. At first he felt comforted by it. If this was what the machines could do, he would always have a place in the world. Sure, the machine made furniture quickly and cheaply, but he had never sold to people looking for quick and cheap furniture anyway.
As the months passed, though, he began to see things change. There were new carpenters in town. Their work wasn’t great, but it wasn’t horrible either. He was losing some of his customers. Not the ones who really cared about quality, but still, it wasn’t great for business.
He went to visit one and, lo and behold, their shop was filled with machines. The magic machines that salesman had attempted to sell him. Surely they couldn’t have gotten that much better in just a few months, right? He went to find the carpenter, but could only find an attendant at the front desk.
“Where is the carpenter?”, he asked. “Well, I guess its me. If you want to call me that, you can. Are you looking for furniture? If so, just let me know what you’d like! I’m really good at talking to the machines, so you tell me, and I’ll tell them just what they need to hear to make the perfect piece!” He left in a hurry.
A few months later, things were still changing quickly. The salesman came back. He claimed that he would give him a machine for just one hundred dollars a month. He didn’t have to use it if he didn’t want to, but given that all his competitors use it, he should probably get familiar, right? He caved.
He started asking the machine for simple things. Customers who just wanted a simple chair. They couldn’t really tell the difference (although he could), except that he could just walk into the back room and come out with just the thing for them! And the part of him that loved the people started to understand.
Time went by. He got used to the machine. His own unique skills and taste combined with an increasing ability to talk the machine into making the right thing got him to a point where the work was actually quite passable. And instead of making one piece a week, he was able to create one piece a day. And then 5 pieces a day. Happy customers all! That feeling that he so rarely got before was coming practically every couple of hours. It was a rush.
So he started changing how he worked. He bought more machines. He so very rarely had to correct the machines work that at this point he actually just spent his time talking. Talking to customers. Understanding their needs. Translating to the machine. He often had multiple conversations going at once, with multiple customers and multiple machines! He stayed busy, profitable and, while everything had changed, he still got to see their satisfied faces. It was enough.
The salesman kept coming back and upgraded his machines. Every time, they got a bit more pricey, but boy did these things cook. He could practically just give them one instruction and get the perfect piece! His personality and vision is what kept him beating out his competitors, and now he got to spend more time thinking about the kinds of problems that people had.
He got ahead of it. He started offering packages for entire rooms, then entire houses. He knew just how all of the different pieces of furniture should go together to make something wonderful. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. There were people living in houses where every single piece of furniture had been made by him! Well, not entirely by him. But still, it was his taste, his facilitation that made it all work.
Then, one day, people stopped coming. It happened practically overnight. He went to visit his best customer. Everything they owned had been made by him, so he had been to their house many times.
He knocked on their door, put on his friendliest face, and said “Hey there! I hope I’m not intruding, but I haven’t seen you around the shop lately. I hope everything is okay. Curious if you might have anything else on your mind I might be able to make for you. Special deal for my most special customer.”
“Well”, the man said, “the thing is, we just had our own machine installed at the house. We love your work, but these things are so good at making it just the way you make it, it doesn’t really make sense for us to pay you, just for you to tell the machine what we want, does it? Really love your work, thank you! Not the best time, we’re just sitting down for dinner, hope you don’t mind!”
The carpenter didn’t really know what to do. He was shocked. He wandered back to his workshop, empty and quiet. He sat in his chair, and looked down at his hands. He didn’t recognize them. They were soft and smooth. All the love was gone from them.