The Do Village

At first glance Joel Bukiewicz’s first love stopped loving him back. His first love was writing, he now makes cooking knives. Take a better look though and it makes sense, Bukiewicz’s passion, his want and need, is to make something useful that will be around forever. Whether you make things or stories, if they are good enough, they will stick around for future generations to use and enjoy. Bukiewicz loved writing, it was his thing, he had his heart set on being a writer. He wrote, he submitted manuscripts and hoped, but he didn’t get the response he needed. He started to realise and accept, writing might not be his future. So he took a few months off to reflect. He had to face his fear of losing the one thing he loved to do, he felt lost.

Something began to happen to Bukiewicz during this downtime. He started to make things, he found himself looking for things to make and fix, useful things. The need to create sentences and stories had started to be filled by this need to make things. One of these useful things he made was a knife. Bukiewicz says he got “really good, really fast” at knife making. He had found his talent. He was selling knives within 3 months. Bukiewicz saw that there was an art to good knife making just as much as there is an art to good writing; “Same for writing and knife making, it takes buckets of blood, sweat and fucking work to get good, to get competent, maybe you have it in you to be an artist, maybe you don’t.”

So what is your one thing? What is the thing that you have a natural aptitude for? Have you found it yet? And are you doing it? As Steve Jobs puts it:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is

great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Don’t feel defeated if you haven’t found it yet, keep looking for the work that feels natural to you.

Most of us know how it feels to do a job solely to earn a bit of cash, we’re capable, we endeavor to get the job done. However, we feel forced to do it, our monthly pay packet holds us ransom. There is a different kind of work, work that you want to do well, work that you get lost in so that it makes you forget the time, work that you can feel pride in, work that feels worth the effort. The kind of work that you find yourself thinking about in the shower, and not in the ‘Shit, I have that meeting that I haven’t prepared for today’ way. But rather in the ‘I’m passionate about this, how can I make it better?’ way.

You can’t know where your talents lie unless you are open to trying. Be brave. Try not to see it as a failure when things don’t go as you hoped and wished, there is most likely a good reason for this. If you have tried and feel like you have given it your all, move on, this life is the only chance you are going to get to find that thing you cannot live without . Don’t “for the sake of momentum.. condemn the future to death. So it can match the past.” (Aimee Mann) Bukiewicz found his thing and has made a great business out of it, he has a ridiculously long waiting list for his knives. His passion for his craft and his product mean that his knives are beautiful and are such good quality that they will outlive us all. If you can find what you are great at then Bukiewicz believes that there will be a demand for it; “Marketing plans and logos and packaging and social media, it’s like if the work isn’t there then it’s just furniture for a house that doesn’t exist – but if the work is great, people will come.”

Watch Joel Bukiewicz’s Do Lecture