I get asked if it takes a special kind of person to be a success at this.
And my answer is always "yes it does.
" I see people do this and succeed and I see people who work real hard and not achieve what they wanted.
Rather than becoming a designer maker of Fine Furniture, they may have to settle for something less, like a decent job in a workshop that may not be top of the pile.
It's a tough game and you need to be good at lots of difficult things.
Yet the qualities required for success may surprise you.
Talent, no this is not one of them.
The conventional wisdom is that artists are born not made.
I profoundly disagree with this.
I believe that we all have the latent ability to become much more creative than we are now.
I had a student with me called Patrick who was a member of the British armed forces.
A trained killer and very, very, good at it.
Until just before his course with me he was a personal guard out in Iran.
Not a promising CV for a creative soul you would think, yet Patrick learned to use his eyes in the services, not to avoid lamp posts but to avoid bullets.
He learned to use his eyes to see.
That seeing, with just a little redirection, is now enabling him to develop new inventive and exciting chair designs that he will market in conjunction with his landscape gardener partner.
What it does take is courage, determination and the ability to take and control risks.
There is no creativity without risk.
The trick is to fail fast, learn, and move on.
There is no easy way to do this except to try and not make mistakes that have already been made before.
One of the longest series of tea break talks I do is on my career as a furniture designer maker from schoolboy to old fart with all the failures left in.
Learn from me, do not make my mistakes, go make your own!!