Learn by Doing
Tacit knowledge, participation in learning, and the value of just getting started
I'm now about 2 years into this total laundry room renovation. I know, it's an embarrassingly long time, and should function as a grade-A lesson in the drawbacks of DIY. If I'd just paid someone, it would've been done sometime in 2022.
But in my defense, it's been a lot of enjoyable work. And all-in would cost us many thousands to do the full sum of things that I've done. Completely custom wall and floor cabinets, designed and fit to maximize the space. High quality drawer and door hardware. Custom shaker doors. Butcher block countertop with maple trim. All new lighting.
There's a ton of detail in this thing, and I'm proud of what I've (slowly) gotten done. With 2 kids, a job, and the fact that it's a daily-use room that needs to function, it's a challenge to block out large enough time windows to get chunks of work done on it. When chances to work come in 1 hour increments, it takes a while to make substantive progress.
But here I am, closing in on finished.
While I'm certainly no stranger to working with my hands or building things, this project has been a collection of things I've never done before. I'd never built a cabinet, never tiled a wall, never installed drawers. One might wonder what made me bite this off in the first place. Well in short: learning this kind of thing is fun.
Learning any craft is made harder in certain ways today by the lack of the apprenticeship culture that was the way we used to learn almost everything. My father and grandfather imparted some wisdom in craftsmanship over the years, but I wouldn’t call the experience a structured apprenticeship — more of an exposure, an occasional project providing an example of someone else making.
All the book-reading and planning and researching in the world wasn't going to teach me how to construct a cabinet. Doing it was the only way to learn the thousand tiny movements that go into doing it well.
All tacit knowledge works like this. It's the kind of knowledge that requires presence in the work, an ability to observe the act done well, and to create mental maps of techniques and movements. Metalworking, sports, speaking a new language, riding a bike, cooking, cabinetmaking — all of these demand active participation to master. Each is difficult to articulate, formalize, or communicate to others through verbal or written instruction alone. They're riddled with hidden subtleties hard to explain, but (relatively) easy to show. At least enough for the would-be apprentice to attempt themselves.
Contrast tacit with explicit knowledge like mathematical formulas, the laws of physics, or rules of grammar. While these may be complex to understand comprehensively, it's not due to signal loss in the information transfer. The details of the Pythagorean theorem are perfectly preserved when stating a² + b² = c².
called tacit knowledge a form of "intellectual dark matter": pervasive, influential, and essential to maintaining our society, but hard to articulate or make legible. The sort of knowledge that requires us to respect the sources of, lest we lose it for good. Modernity arguably makes many of them obsolete: survival skills, calligraphy, handweaving, endangered languages. Who needs them, right? But over time, loss of hard-won knowledge will lead down a path that homogenizes culture, and might make the world less interesting and more susceptible to shock and disruptions.So how did I learn how to make cabinets?
Other than a passing comfort level with the tools required, and making a few rudimentary pieces of furniture, my detailed knowledge of cabinetmaking was purely from looking at how others put them together.
My guide was YouTube.
I've probably watched a hundred videos covering all variations of construction methods for cabinet boxes and doors, the installation steps, the useful tools. A metric ton of content consumed to see all sorts of possible approaches, learning from others' successes and failures.
Samo has a great post on the YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer in which he points to the incredible project we’ve undertaken in preserving and passing on tacit knowledge, without it even being the stated goal of the product. YouTube’s benefit as a global catchall how-to transmitter has become an accepted default for many people.
The ability to watch a dozen different carpenters build cabinets is a resource we never imagined in the master/apprentice days. Yet even with this bottomless archive of tacit knowledge, the learning doesn't happen exclusively in the mind. Without the doing the learner hasn't really learned.
Explicit knowledge exists in the mind, and the learner can learn from idealized examples. A physics problem might ignore friction and wind resistance for the sake of learning an underlying principle. A student of grammar learns the idealized syntax. In the tacit world, the messy details matter and have to be accounted for. Learning to ride a bike in the wind or the rain is an inevitability the tacit learner must deal with in practice. A version of the skill where you remove the messy realities is one you’ll never actually encounter.
The mathematician also tends to idealize any situation with which he is confronted. His gases are “ideal,” his conductors “perfect,” his surfaces “smooth.” He calls this “getting down to essentials.” The engineer is likely to dub it “ignoring the facts.”
—James Gleick, The Information
With the knowledge I'd siphoned from YouTube and a visual inspection of my and some of my unsuspecting friends' cabinets, I still hit all kinds of challenges along the way that even the hundred tutorials didn't warn me about. Countless little hurdles in the process exposed ways to do it better, easier, faster next time. In crafts like carpentry, effective order-of-operations alone is like a secret that can only be learned by doing it wrong. I'd bet I could shave 30% off of the time it took, and avoid a dozen minor mistakes, if I got to do it over again. All because of details learned in doing.
Tacit knowledge resists the attempt to learn through reading or hearing. There's a similarity here to my belief that in creative work, you need to get started to know where you're going, and how craftsmanship is an exercise in error correction. Each requires the commitment and the willingness to plow forward into the uncomfortable, to either find where you want to go, or to learn the nuances of craft.
I’ll leave you with an appropriate meme to motivate you to learn that new skill you’ve been chasing:
Thanks for reading. I’d welcome any thoughts or comments, and feel free to share this post with your friends and colleagues.
Well done. Staying curious and getting out of one's comfort zone = fulfilling life.