WHO MAKES THINGS

Who makes things?

A person makes something, and thereby produces.

The individual may act alone, or as part of a group of people with a common product, but after everything else is said, it is a single person who produces.

Ask anyone what they do and they will tell you their title. But ask them what they make, or produce, and you will get a very confusing answer. Often they won’t know.

They may know what their organization makes, but they themselves may not think of what they do as making anything.

Besides not recognizing the fact that we don’t make anything but only remake raw products, we also do not think of most of our jobs as making anything.

What if each of us begins to ask ourselves, even if our bosses won’t, “What do I make?” Can we answer that question? If not, we are not producing.

How do you make something?

Ask any artisan how to make something and they will be glad to tell you. They are proud of their skill.

If you ask them how to acquire the skill they will tell you to make something using that skill. Duh!

Make something. Work at it every day. At the same time. All day if you can. Work at it for 20 minutes if not. Just show up and make something.

Sounds way too easy, huh?

So once you know what you make, could you make sure that you make it at least once every day.

Why we like to believe that producing is hard?

Is producing hard? Sure. Is it simple? Yes!

We like to think that raising production is difficult so that we have a reason to not produce. It also gives us a reason to feel good about what we do get done.

We like to think that what we do is hard and hard things have value. But the more we convince ourselves that it is hard the more we may dread doing it. We don’t like to do hard things.

If producing takes sweat, time, concentration, effort, or patience we have a lot of reasons to not do it. It isn’t easy. Easy is the opposite of hard.

But it is simple. Once you know what you produce and how to do it, it just means “do it”. Every day. All day. As much as you can. Put off the title to your job as much as possible and produce what you produce.

Man, I hate that.

HOW TO MAKE AMERICA PRODUCTIVE AGAIN

Who makes things? It is part of human hubris to ask that question because it assumes that only the things humans make are worth being called “made”. In fact, humans make almost nothing. Instead we remake what exists into new forms and uses. But as far as I can tell no human makes a raw product, we simply remake. I wish there was a more honest word for what we do.

I checked the thesaurus for synonyms of “make” but none of the words particularly describe our activities in changing raw products into some other thing. What we actually do is remake materials into new forms and uses. But none of the words in the thesaurus for “remake” actually describe what humans do either.

And what does it mean to make, or remake, something. Is it only the person who puts his hand to the raw product and changes it, or is the person who thought of the process a “maker” also? What about the person who designed the product; are they “makers”? Is the person who saw the design and the process and believed that it could work and so financed the operation, are they “makers”? And is the person who simply grows the products a “maker”, or a kind of miner?

Making is not always the same as production, yet we use the same word for extracting coal, growing crops, assembling cars, or manufacturing widgets. Making, mining and growing are not the same things, but they all seem productive. Even writers and musicians produce, but do they make? As I set out to make suggestions for how to make America productive, am I making anything at all? I am first beset by confusion over what it even means to make and produce.

This is the year 2011. It has been a busy holiday and I am just getting back to business, if one can call it that. My first post of the New Year was about time. Nothing to creative about that I suppose. But back in November of 2010 I wrote a blog about how America has moved from a production society to a consumption society. In that post I said I would follow up with one about how Americans might reverse that trend.

Was that ever presumptuous?! I have been thinking about that promise for over two months now and decided that there is so much to be said that suggestions for making America productive should become my theme for 2011. I don’t intend to neglect the bees. It turns out that bees are one way we can be productive, and at the same time save the world. It isn’t too much to ask is it?

THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE

          “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times . . . .”  No, wait! That’s already taken.  How about, “To everything there is a season . . . .”  What?  That’s already been used too?  Then how about, “The time of your life”?  I know it’s a cliché, but I really mean the “time” of your life.  Our lifetime’s take place at certain rhythms that are sometimes obscured and forgotten in our modern world that is driven by technology.  It might be interesting to know how things happen through biological time.

One of the fastest things that happen in your body is the transmission of information along your neurons.  The rate is variable depending on a lot of factors.  In peripheral nerves from your big toe to your spinal cord information can transfer as fast as 225 miles per hour, or 330 ft/sec.  That’s about the fastest thing that happens in your body.

Some muscles work quickly and some work slowly.  There are muscles in your body that can take several minutes to contract.   Then, there are your eyelid muscles.  They can contract in about 1/300^th of a second.  That is what makes a wink so deadly.  A wink can happen so fast that you aren’t really sure if the winker actually winked at the winkee, or not.  Then what is the winkee to do?  But maybe winking is old fashioned.  Does anyone wink anymore?  Obviously not at me.

          Emptying your stomach can take anywhere from fifteen minutes, if all you put in it was water, to up to six hours, if you ate a big, greasy, pepperoni pizza.  Yes, the pepperoni can still be there at 2:00 am!  The time it takes, on average, for food to move entirely through your digestive track, from start to, shall we say, finish, is about 12 hours.  If you hurry things along much faster than that, there isn’t time for your body to remove enough water from the food.  Then you will have, what are politely called, loose stools. 

          Did you know that if you get less than eight hours of sleep, all your immune cells are measurably less effective.  Certain cells that attack and engulf foreign invaders loose efficiency with the loss of only one hour of sleep.  Other cells secrete antibodies when you get sick.  Even if you are healthy and well rested, it can take up to two or three weeks to produce enough antibodies to be effective.  That’s why they say that if you eat right and get plenty of rest, you can get well in two weeks.  But if you don’t, it’s going to take fourteen days.

          The truly-magic number in human, biological time is six weeks.  That probably doesn’t sound familiar to you.  But consider these facts.  Wound healing generally takes about six weeks.  Obviously the timing depends on the wound, but even minor surgery requires about six weeks to repair the damaged capillary bed.  And guess how long it generally takes to remove all the nicotine from the body after you quit smoking.  About six weeks.  If you start a new training regimen, it will take about six weeks to grow new muscle.  If you start learning a new skill, like playing a new song on a musical instrument, it will take about six weeks to master.  It even takes about six weeks to metabolize 5 lbs. of fat.  Six weeks is such a universal estimate of biological function in humans that I have decided to name this time frame a new unit of time called a “hexachron”. 

          Though we coordinate our lives around a twenty-four-hour clock, a seven-day week, a thirty-day month and a fifty-two-week year, biological time is something else entirely.  The biological “time” cycle is most often about six weeks, a hexachron.  And you only have a little less than nine hexachrons left this year.