Artisans don't do Seconds.

A Matter of Identity.

Reputations are such fragile, precious things. And yet, when we’re busy, it becomes so easy to put them in the custody of those who have no regard for them.

We can be defined by the last thing we touched, for good or bad. The email drafted by AI, sent in a hurry, or the handwritten note that we took the time to write for somebody important or who’d done something for us. Our sign off on a phone call, or the speed with which we send an AI generated meeting transcript without checking it.

Or the time spent looking at an idea from different angles, and experimenting, in order to present an idea in its best light, and give it life.

Used well, AI can enhance our craft. Used carelessly, it can make us at best, easily replaceable and at worst, irrelevant.

Artisans make the biggest difference in what they do through their selection of raw materials, their love of what they shape, and their ruthlessness in assessing what they have produced before they let it loose in the world.

Go into any craft workshop, and you will see large piles of discards that a normal business may well have decided they can get away with, or created a market for in their seconds shop.

Artisans don’t do seconds.