The best words of advice I’ve heard sound simple until you give them some thought. Here are three things to consider.
“Good beekeepers have to figure some things out for themselves.”
This was a simple statement made by a beekeeper and mother to her teenaged woodworker who was struggling with sharpening, setting up a handplane and producing a nice surface.
She didn’t know about woodworking, but she knew about farming and bees. And when her young son despaired that he could not get his plane to work, she spoke those 10 fantastic words:
“Good beekeepers have to figure some things out for themselves.”
A couple years ago I heard Mike Siemsen of “The Naked Woodworker” DVD fame discussing workbenches with a new woodworker.
Question: What about moisture content blah, blah, blah?
Siemsen: Don’t worry about it. It will work out fine.
Question: But the wood species yadda yadda annular rings shinka shinka gymnosperms?
Siemsen: It will all work out fine. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Question: So E-value, Janka rating and tangent grain? Roubo, Nicholson and Klausz?
Yoda: Fine it will all work out. Worry not.
…this conversation continued for another 30 minutes in the same format.
Third vignette. Matthew Sheldon Bickford, author of “Mouldings in Practice,” ends his book with the best single-word ending sentence in the history of woodworking writing. Stick with me here.
“Be willing to succeed by being willing to fail,” he writes on page 241. “Tie yourself to your actions. Stop reading. Err!”
— Christopher Schwarz