Ask Craft Questions

 This from Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing newsletter:

Recently I was intrigued to learn that author/speaker Dan Heath had launched a podcast with an interesting and distinctly curiosity-driven theme. In What It’s Like To Be…, Heath interviews people about their work: a criminal defense attorney, a forensic accountant, a TV meteorologist, etc. But he has a particular angle: Often, even when we know what people do for a living, we don’t know how they actually go about doing it. And those details are what made him curious.

Heath has described the project as an exercise in “slow curiosity” — interviews about the specific nuts and bolts of a range of jobs, without chasing some specific payoff. “Curiosity can be a means to an end,” he wrote. “But couldn’t it also be … the end? A reward in itself?”

Of course my answer would be: Yes! And to me what Heath is up to here is committing an “act of curiosity:” Having noticed something that made him wonder, he set out to actively satisfy that wonder. The resulting podcast is sort of like a Song Exploder for work, deconstructing one profession at a time.

In the spirit of active curiosity, I asked Heath if he could share a prompt or challenge to TAoN readers inspired by the podcast, and what he’s learned so far. He graciously offered the excellent idea below, suggesting what he called “craft questions.” Here’s Heath:

In the show, I really enjoy asking questions about methods and tools and approaches. I asked a stadium beer vendor about his favorite tools, and he waxed nostalgic about a can opener he used in the old days that let him pour beer quickly and without foam. A hair stylist told me about his $1000 scissors from Japan and the way they balance perfectly in his hands. It's fun to understand the craft involved in people's jobs.

So my challenge would be: Ask someone a craft question. Show interest in the way they do their work. Not "How's your job going?" or "What's going on at work?" More like: (barista) "How do you get those cool swirly hearts on the latte foam?" or (nurse) "When you can tell someone's afraid to have their blood drawn, what do you do?" I think you'll be surprised by how much those craft questions can energize your conversation.