Craft or sell:
you've already picked one.

I've been sitting with an observation for a while now.

You can either be excellent at a craft, or excellent at selling one. Both are real skills. Both take years. But they pull in opposite directions — and most people never admit which way they're actually going.

I picked up the 80/20 principle years ago, and it reframed how I saw people I'd written off as fakers.

Going from zero to eighty is relatively achievable. Most people with discipline and time can get there. But eighty to a hundred? That's a different sport entirely. The last twenty percent of mastery costs more than the first eighty combined.

So when I meet someone who seems to be doing both — selling brilliantly and delivering brilliantly — I've learned to look closer. Usually, one of them is sitting at eighty. Confident, fluent, competent. But not the full hundred. And the interesting part is, for most rooms, eighty is enough. Nobody in the room knows the difference.

The salesman looks like he knows the product. The craftsperson looks like they know the client. Neither is lying, exactly. They just haven't told you the whole truth.

I once watched a salesman sell carpentry goods like a magician.

Charming. Well-read on the buyer. He navigated the room, persuaded, and somehow made you feel like this was the only woodwork worth considering. Then a prospect asked a technical question — grain direction, joinery, something specific — and the salesman could only take it so far.

That's when the master carpenter walked in.

The carpenter knew things the salesman would never know. And the salesman knew things the carpenter would never know. Neither one was inferior. They were just operating from completely different depths.

My mechanic at the local dealership is the same story, told in reverse. Honda flies this man across North America to diagnose problems nobody else can crack. He sees things in an engine that I can't even form the language to ask about. But selling? He couldn't sell you ice cold water on a bright sunny day.

The craft made him extraordinary. The same depth that made him extraordinary also made him impossible to put in a room with a customer.

The craftsperson pays in isolation.

Almost every world-class maker I know has a very small, very close circle. They don't chase noise. They can't afford to. Chasing excellence is quiet, and sometimes it makes the people closest to you resent you for it. It narrows you on purpose. The depth is the point — and the depth costs you.

The connector pays in belonging.

A person with real breadth can walk into almost any room and find the thread. They bridge gaps, translate between worlds, make teams work. But they often end up in the category of generalist — and generalist, somehow, became an insult. You're everywhere and nowhere. Useful to everyone, claimed by no one.

Both paths have a shadow side.

The craftsperson can disappear into the work — so deep in the nuances of how a color lifts a mood, or how a specific frequency makes you feel safer, that they lose sight of where the work lands. The impact of their own output sometimes escapes them.

The connector can lose the felt sense of the work itself. Somewhere along the way, they stop making and start facilitating making, and it's genuinely hard to grieve something you chose.

There's a principle in leadership I've found quietly radical.

To lead something well, you don't need to know one hundred percent of it. You need about thirty. Enough to ask the right questions, enough to recognise excellence when it's in the room, enough to know when you're being misled. Then you find the person who knows the full hundred — and you build with them.

This reframed everything for me.

One excellent craftsperson, working alone, has a ceiling. A group of excellent craftspeople, pulled together and pointed in the same direction, doesn't. The facilitator doesn't diminish the craftsperson. The facilitator is the reason the craftsperson's work reaches further than it ever would alone.

This isn't for the person who's mid-career and settled. That person has already picked, even if they haven't said it out loud yet.

This is for the person early on, still trying to do both, feeling torn because — and I say this from experience — both are genuinely good. Both feel right. The craft has a pull to it that's almost spiritual. And the connection, the facilitation, the moment a team clicks into something bigger than any one of them — that has a pull too.

What I'd tell a younger version of myself is this: learn thirty percent of a craft. Enough to be dangerous, enough to be credible. Then find the person who knows it at a hundred, and build with them.

And don't do it to build a career. Do it to build something that matters. Because at the end of it, it's not about you or me or the craftsperson. It's about what we made possible together.