The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do

you might not be able to practice a trade until your thirties.
That’s only if you were lucky enough to get an
apprenticeship in the first place.
Ten years. That’s how long it took to master a craft. This
may be difficult to grasp today, when nearly every college
student has the opportunity to go through multiple
internships without much practical application, but as we
have seen so far, finding your calling takes time. Practice is
essential not only to achieve excellence but to clarify the
call itself. An apprenticeship was an excellent way of
learning a skill under the guidance of someone wiser and
more experienced. But these days, there is little left of the
apprenticeship system, which has left an unfortunate gap in
our education. With the dawn of the Renaissance, the guilds
eventually declined, and the popularity of universities grew,
replacing the apprenticeship with a more general education.
The ancient art of diving deep into a specific craft all but
disappeared.
In modern times, the responsibility for reaching your
potential is often left up to the individual. This is more than
a challenge; it’s a cruel taunt. How can a person be all she’s
supposed to be if she doesn’t know who she is, if she
doesn’t have some example to aspire to? Pulling ourselves
up by our bootstraps can only take us so far, and despite
what we’ve heard, there is no such thing as a self-made
man. We are all products of our environment, influenced by
the people we encounter and the places we live. Born into
this world with zero ability, we cannot talk, much less feed