Good things are hard to make.
It usually starts with “a really cool sword” – something that captures our desires and imagination. Wouldn’t it be amazing to make something like that?
Being total amateurs we set about it in haphazard fashion: finding crude anvil and hammer, heating a forge, practicing the blacksmith’s way. We toil and sweat and get cut and burned, heating and hammering this lump of metal into shape.
Inevitably the first sword sucks. It might be crooked, brittle, ugly, ungainly, or downright dangerous. It almost certainly doesn’t meet spec.
Holding it in our hands we have a choice to make:
- View it as a failure that doesn’t justify the enormous expense of the forge. Call it quits and get a real job.
- Love it for what it is and view the forge as an asset. Forge another sword better than the first, and another after that.
Adopting a long-term view suggests that you are on a journey, not at a destination. Completion becomes learning and product becomes practice. There is always another sword to make and the chance of it being awesome goes up every time.
The emphasis moves from the product to what makes the product. Knowledge and craft are developed. Skills are honed. Stamina earned.
Narsil becomes inevitable.
10 January 2025, Nogrod.
