We will now interrupt the regularly scheduled program for this good old Blades micro podcast. We have the benefit, um, the same as other animals is uh being problem solvers. And I think in life that's what we do. Like we we there's problems in front of us and we solve it. There's puzzles, we solve them. Um and uh by and large, I think most people are like that. It doesn't matter whether it's your finances, it doesn't matter whether it's you know uh relationships, it doesn't matter whether it's work, um, craftsmanship, everything. Like you you you you're presented with something and you and you try to figure out a way to hack it, um, to get from point A to point B in the shortest amount of steps, and it maybe it's an inherent laziness, uh maybe it's uh efficiency, whatever you want to call it. But uh there's there's some like that that's a driving force in in making anything. But something that you have to realize is there's there's not a single process that you can optimize so much that you can you can hack it. Um and and what I mean is uh some things they just take the amount of time that they take, right? And rushing it does not make it better. Um rushing it does not improve the quality a lot of times, and in fact, sometimes you just create or compound problems that you have to solve later on. And uh the idea in going from rudimentary understanding of of concepts, like I mean, we're gonna talk about blade making here, but it really can be applied to a lot of different crafts and uh disciplines and studies, is you go from understanding the rudiments to uh to having all of those down pat and having a uh an encyclopedia or lexicon of techniques and things that you can use, and then you start getting into this mastery phase. And mastery allows you to be able to play, like that's really what it comes down to, is when you understand how to do things and you do them well, and you can uh accomplish them uh to a specific idea um or or uh standard, then you can get into this area of mastery where you can really just play around and be creative. And and that's one of the things that I personally uh want to always get to with every aspect of knife making, because it's not enough for me just to make something that is a knife-shaped object. It's not enough for me to, you know, do uh one kind of uh bone jigging uh that looks good, or one uh one kind of hiding pins or cutting nail nicks or fitting guards or um hand finishing things. Like I don't want to just like learn it uh kind of, I want to get it and nail it. So what I see in my head is what I get on that piece that I'm making. And uh there's just no get rich quick schemes with most aspects of knives. And that's why you see that there's a lot of people that uh kind of burn out during the rudiments phase of knife making because you know they kind of like they maybe they know how to hit a piece of metal a little bit, maybe they know how to grind a little bit. Um maybe you can use some tooling like uh you know, grinding jigs or things like that to make stuff work and kind of get knife-shaped objects uh out of it. But really pushing beyond um the uh a very surface level of rudiments, getting deep into technique, getting deep into the fundamentals will benefit you greatly if you can stick with it. And uh the there's there's there's several different schools of thought on like how you get there in knife making. Uh one is obviously you gotta put in the time, right? The time is I'm going to make a thousand knives, and by the thousandth knife, uh it's just gonna be better than my first knife. And that's true. Um, oftentimes you don't see somebody who messes up a thousand times and doesn't learn anything from those. Um, I would really argue that's probably the definition of insanity where you're doing the same thing over and over again and getting different uh and expecting different results. Um so you want to like learn a as you go along every every piece, you want to improve a little bit, and there's an expectation that you just do that over a long period of time. Um there's also the uh school of thought where you spend a lot of time researching and understanding what problem you're solving and break it down into ways that you can control the outcome that you get. So, for instance, maybe um maybe you're working on uh making your plunge lines even, and you're like, well, I'm just going to do it, but I'm really gonna think very hard about how exactly I hold the blade, how exactly I address it, address it to the to the belt, um, so on and so forth, and you get it all down. Uh there's talking to other people and getting advice on and tips and tricks and things, and so on and so forth. All these are kind of like methodologies for how you um get to a place where you get down the fundamentals. But um, however you learn, the general theme should be that you have to keep doing it. It doesn't matter whether there are five weeks between blades, it doesn't matter whether um you're on again, off again. The idea is that you need to persevere through it because uh there are a lot of of knife makers that I have seen, uh their personal journeys and everything, and they start out not doing too hot. Like uh the understanding the fundamentals is a difficult thing, it doesn't come naturally, and that's okay. It's okay, it's your deal, it's your it's your show. Do you and and make those crappy knives, right? Uh we all do. I I can't I don't think that I've seen too many people that their very first knife is just amazing. I've seen some that make incredible first knives, but they're cheating because a lot of them have uh experience in other disciplines that makes it uh a little bit more intuitive for them. So the learning curve is like a a little bit quicker. Um there are some people that are just also naturally talented, and it just you know something about it just clicks with them. So those people, I'm not talking about you because all of us are jealous of it, and I wish that were the case. But um it's important for you to keep trying. It's important for you to learn from your mistakes, it's important for you to expand your knowledge set so that way um you you don't just do the same thing over again. If it's not working, stop it. Stop doing it, find a way that does make sense for you. And sometimes you might circle back to a technique that maybe somebody gave you advice on and you say, Oh, that makes perfect sense. Maybe I should have been doing that the entire time, but it just didn't click for you, right? And if you'll do that, like they say uh the uh the only way to get to to Carnegie is practice, practice, practice, right? And it's the same way with knives, and it really is the same way with everything else. If you try to hack your way through it to short circuit things and to um, you know, try to beat the system, you'll just realize that you're beating your head against a wall because there's just no way, like unless you have somebody else making your knives for you that actually knows how to do it, to gain that knowledge set, it just takes time. So if you will realize that and you will accept that failure is the building blocks of success, and I know I'm getting philosophical here too a little bit, um, but if you understand that, then you can really just focus on trying to be successful with individual aspects of every single knife that you make. Um, you can practice like break down like drilling holes, you can practice uh profiling things, you can practice um tapering tangs if you want to do that, or fitting guards, like I mean, fit fit up five guards and mock mock up things so you're only working on a specific technique type. And then you can you can build those into an entire blade. So if you want to micro segment it and and build out those knowledge sets and get good at those individual things, you can put it all together in a symphony of a knife, and you'll probably be better than if you just like muddled through the entire um the entire song uh doing everything poorly, right? Um other people they learn uh well that way. So it's like jump jump into the deep end, see whether you sink or swim and what comes out on the other side, right? But again, idea is perseverance is really important. Um it is just a part of learning, and I encourage you to stick with it and ask lots of questions, do a lot of research, uh, fumble with things because through your failures, you can create amazing things. And it's important to to just stick with it. And that I think is what my definition of pay your dues is is if you if you put in your time and you put in your brain power, uh you will pay your dues and you will gain that knowledge that you need to to produce fabulous works of art if that's where you want to go. Um and it it really just takes a bunch of time uh and tenacity. Hope that helps.