LIFE CRAFTING: The System to Make a Masterpiece of Your Life

'Life Crafting' is gaining in popularity, particularly on high school and college campuses around the world including Harvard University, U.C. Berkeley, and Erasmus University Rotterdam to name a few.

Life Crafting is a structured approach to managing your life. Like a well-designed building, we begin with a solid foundation, define a clear purpose for the interior spaces, and ensure the walls and roof are strong and built to last.

‘Life-as-a-Craft’ deals with the entire body of knowledge and specific skills we learn and apply to our physical, mental, and spiritual experiences as human beings during our lifetime.

Practicing Life-as-a-Craft adopts this same end objective as you practice incremental improvement across all the topics you have and will choose to learn in the Five Elements making up your unique life curriculum.

The Five Elements: Your Life Curriculum

Life-as-a-Craft organizes this body of knowledge: (i.e.) your life curriculum, into a framework of Five Elements or categories. Each element is a container for related topics making it easy for you to 'check box' topics you have learned thus far in your life and find new related topics to learn over your lifetime presented in Four Phases of development.

• Element 1: Family & Personal Heritage

• Element 2: Family & Household Management

• Element 3: Family & Personal Finance

• Element 4: The Human Being (Inner Self & Outer Self)

• Element 5: Tools for Living

The Four Phases: Your Life Journey

1. Apprenticeship - The Learning Phase (Age 14-25)

2. Journeywork - The Building Phase (Age 25-45)

3. Masterwork - The Masterpiece Phase (Age 45-65)

4. Mentorship - The Legacy Phase (Age 65-85+)

The Way of Craftsmanship: The Way You Work

While it will take you all or most of the Four Phases that comprise your lifetime to master Life-as-a-Craft, once you practice excellence in everything you do: the Way of Craftsmanship, you are practicing life success by design vs. success by accident. You are Making a Masterpiece of Your Life.

• The end objective of the structure used to teach most crafts practiced in the world is to incrementally improve your performance on your journey toward mastery of the craft.

• Practicing Life-as-a-Craft is based on this same structure as you practice incremental improvement across all the topics you have chosen and will choose to learn in the Five Elements making up your unique life curriculum over the Four Phases of your lifetime.

• Craftsmanship is the way you perform everything you do in life to produce quality results.

The First Element of learning and practicing Life-as-a-Craft is your Family & Personal Heritage. Your Family is alive with a past, a present, and a future. It is the place from which Human Beings emerge and connect in some form all the days of our lives.

Who you are and who you become is greatly influenced by your connection to family. It is the basis of who we first see ourselves to be. Heritage includes everything you learn from your family and your personal encounter with the world and its many heritages.

These are just a few of the many topics organized within this Element:

1. Ancestry — also known as Genealogy and your family tree

2. Family Rituals (special things you do as a Family)

3. Family Symbols (a Family emblem or Coat of Arms)

4. Your Family Name

5. Family Heirlooms & Memorabilia

Family & Household Management is like managing a master craftsman’s workshop and is critical to the family’s happiness and success. If you think of household management as managing the 'family workshop’ where people are learning and practicing life-as-a-craft, a wide range of topics can be found within this element.

This includes managing the physical infrastructure of your home and equipment, as well as thoughtful guidelines and processes you will observe and practice as members of the family workshop.

These are just a few of the many topics organized within this Element:

1. Family Policies

2. Information Privacy

3. Grievances & Suggestions

4. Home, Garden & Equipment Care

Family & Personal Finance deals with skillfully managing your money. Money is a vital resource to fuel the growth of your family as water is to the growth of a flower. Families and individuals can achieve incremental excellence in this critical element providing an abundance of resources for family and personal growth.

Healthy financial management in a relationship involves learning how to spend and manage your money wisely, using communication and conflict management skills, and building and maintaining a strong foundation of trust with your partner.

These are just a few of the many topics organized within this Element:

1. Insurance Coverage

2. Income Generation

3. Budgeting

4. Taxes

5. Credit & Borrowing

Your life is unique and in the primary care of a single craftsperson. You are that craftsperson. Your life is a work in progress. It is always changing and evolving.

You must learn the characteristics of the Inner Human Being & Outer Human Being just as the potter studies clay or the physician studies human anatomy. Like other natural substances, the Human Being is organic, not a perfectly uniform substance like sheet metal. It must be handled skillfully.

These are just a few of the many topics organized within this Element:

The Inner Human Being

• Beliefs

• Emotions

• Spirit

• Values

• Personal Goals

• Career & Livelihood

• Relationships

The Outer Human Being

• Birth

• Sexuality

• Death

• Diet & Nutrition

• Exercise & Recreation

• Grooming & Personal Appearance

• Health & Medical Care

The Fifth Element of Life-as-a-Craft concerns itself with powerful instruments called tools. Generally speaking, tools are objects specifically designed to help us perform a particular task with a higher degree of performance ideally improving the quality of the finished work.

A tool is an extension of the craftsperson. An instrument to harness and shape the energy within us and around us and skillfully focus that energy on the primary material we are working with to achieve a change; that is the desired result.

When using tools to shape your inner-self or outer-self, they must be applied with skill or you run the risk of damaging yourself which may be difficult to repair.

These are just a few of the many topics organized within this Element:

1. Books, Manuals & References

2. Journals, Periodicals, Blogs, Newsfeeds

3. Application Software

4. Personal Electronic Devices

5. Mind-Craft Tools

For thousands of years, human beings have organized, learned, and practiced our trades, occupations, and professions. 

There is a common framework in use in both the mind-crafts and hand-crafts practiced in every culture of the world:

1. Each practitioner must continually practice to incrementally improve their skills to advance to more developed levels of proficiency in the craft.

2. Certifications and titles are often used to designate individuals and their level of proficiency

   • Apprentice — Novice with limited knowledge or experience.

   • Journeyman/woman — Credentialed, skilled practitioner.

   • Master — Advanced credentials, skills, and experienced practitioner.

   • Mentor — Counselor to the craft.

Life-as-a-Craft follows the same time-tested framework used for centuries in the craftsman's workshops of the world.

Apprenticeship is rooted in the word ‘to apprehend’ or ‘to understand something’. It has as much to do with learning “how to learn” as it does with “what to learn”.

In learning life-as-a-craft, Apprenticeship is the specific period of time during which one learns to comprehend the nature of the raw materials of the craft and the skillful use of the tools of the craft.

The Apprenticeship Phase in the practice of life-as-a-craft is comprised of 3 clear goals to focus the attention of those in the apprentice stage on a defined, measurable outcome:

Goal 1: Transition of Responsibility: The Rite of Passage

Goal 2: Learning How To Learn: The Way of Craftsmanship

Goal 3: The Curriculum — What Is to be Learned

The Journeywork phase in the craft-of-life is comprised of the years of work after Apprenticeship age 25–45 by a competent but as yet undistinguished journeyman or journeywoman.

Journeywork takes strength, endurance, and reliance upon one's Apprenticeship training and growing experience to complete the work.

If you are in the Journeywork phase of life-as-a-craft, you will be at work practicing subjects from The Five Elements you first learned during your apprenticeship as well as diving deeper into those subjects building your knowledge and your skills in the subject. But you will also be choosing new subjects within each of the Five Elements as you move across the Journeyworks phase over the next 20 years or so.

The Masterwork Phase age 45–65, begins at the culmination of the Journeywork years during which time one distinguished oneself as a skilled craftsperson by the quality of their work.

The Masterwork Phase is the time for executing a master plan based on the resources and energy developed during the Journeywork phase.

Masterworks is the time for executing your master plan and polishing your life — your “ultimate masterpiece.”

The Mentorship Phase spans a 20+ year time period in the practice of life as a craft, during which the primary objective is to gather together select masterworks, knowledge, and skills development exercises as may be recorded in your Master’s Journal.

In the way of craftsmanship, where one’s craftwork is intended to benefit the well-being of the world around us as well as oneself, these selected artifacts from your life are the tangible legacy you will contribute to your family heritage and future generations of apprentices.