Craftsman and their Tools

Hi, 

Today, we are talking about Craftsmen and their Tools. 

In 2025, we are very comfortable using manufacturing jargon for things like building start-ups or our internal teams at work, so I am going to add to the pit. 

I have been thinking about the idea of a resume, and how it is less about what you have done, and more about the story you built to tell the story of who you are. 

Obviously, our resume isn’t our identity, but to a prospective employer it is essentially your passport. 

So let’s look at building your career like building your house. 

At the beginning of your career, you may have a foundation of some sort in your education or background, you may even have some framing up in the form of a desired career path, but you don’t have any of the actual tools to start building. 

You get your first role, and they teach you something like sales, marketing, operations, finance, or some other field. During this first role, you are given a hammer and told to start nailing everything you see. 

After a few months or years, depending on the task, you become proficient at hammering, so they give you a drill, and the process repeats itself. 

After a few more months or years, the sub-contractor who hired you sees that you are now proficient in hammering and drilling, so much so that you are helping your peers with their hammering and drilling. They say, how would you like to learn how to drywall? 

Excited about the new opportunity, you start drywalling. You come to find that in drywalling you are using your hammering and drilling skills, and without your proficiencies you would have never been able to do drywalling. 

This cycle repeats with moulding, flooring, or maybe you pivot and focus in on electrical or plumbing. The whole time, however, you are using your core skills of hammering and drilling to continue to build these other skills. 

10 years pass, you have all these skills, but the general contractor never asks you to run your own jobs. You feel like you have all the skills to build a home well, why isn’t the contractor giving you the opportunity to run your own team? 

There is a shift that happens as you scale your career. The beginning is all about compiling as many tools as you can get in as short of a time as possible. You pick up extra shifts, you try your hand at other specialties, you need to see and feel as many things as you possibly can. But, as you scale up your tools, you also need to scale yourself. 

The best tools in the world are useless in the hands of a bad craftsman. 

As you scale your career you are judged less by the tools that you have, and more by what you can do with them. 

Over the 10 years you spent learning all the trades that would give you the experience needed to become a team leader, did you commit yourself to the habits in your life that would turn you into the leader the team needs? 

There is this principle called “The Peter Principle” which simply states that you rise to the level of an organization that reflects your level of competency. If you have all the tools, why are you stuck at your level? 

As you transition from an Individual contributor to a manager, you are judged less by what you can do, but by how your team does, which requires you to be the best version of yourself as well as someone who has the requisite tools. 

So how do you scale yourself as a craftsman in the house we call a resume?

This is where your habits, your sleep, your curiosity, and many more self-care activities come into play. You have to grow as a person at the same pace you acquire new tools. 

Because at the end of the day, you want to build a house with the best builder, not the person with the best tools. 

If you spend all your time putting in effort for the metrics on your resume, and forget to invest in the person submitting it you will have a difficult time getting the job, and it is even worse, if you get the job and you aren’t ready for it. 

Happy Sunday, 

Kyle