Decide You Are Not Done

I am not yet done with the scorp.

I’ve never been athletic or graceful. But as a kid, my parents insisted I play sports until I escaped emigrated from Arkansas in 1986. First they made me play baseball – left field for our church team. Then basketball, tennis, track and, finally, swimming (I was too skinny for football or boxing).

I hated every practice, game and shower.¹

But because of my parents’ obsession with sports, I learned something on a July afternoon that has helped immeasurably with my woodworking.

That morning, my mom took me and my three sisters to the city pool to get ready for a swim meet (all the Schwarz kids had to swim competitively). My mom told us to start doing laps – freestyle, butterfly and breaststroke. I did my required laps, but then it was obvious that our family was staying at the pool all day.

I was bored. To pass the time, I started doing laps of the easiest stroke (breaststroke). Back and forth, all day. It didn’t feel like I was working hard or practicing or doing anything but avoiding annihilation by boredom.

At the end of a long day, we went home.

At the swim meet that weekend, I competed in the 100m breaststroke. And, like some bizarre after-school special, I destroyed everyone else in the pool. I won my one and only blue ribbon in sports.

I wasn’t happy about it. I was miserable. Because now my parents would make me swim even more.

If you think this story is about the value of practice, it’s not. I hate practice. It bores me as much as sports. Instead, here is what I learned: If you want to get better at a hand-tool operation, do it. But then decide you are not done and continue doing it.

A perfect example is saddling a chair seat. When I was first learning to use the scorp and travisher, my progress stalled after a dozen seats. My finished seats all looked OK. But they weren’t showing marked improvement.

So when I scorped my next seat, I got to the point where I usually switched to the travisher. But I didn’t switch. I just kept working with the scorp to see how far I could take it. Easy work. Breaststroke, really.

It turned out to be a revelation. That’s because I had already figured out the grain in the seat – where it was tricky and where it was mild. So continuing to scorp the seat and improve the surface wasn’t as difficult as simply scorping a new seat (where you have to first unpuzzle the grain).

So I kept going with shorter and milder strokes, trying to take the scorping to a ridiculous level. Could I finish the seat using only a scorp?

I haven’t done that yet, but I think you can (even though it would be a huge waste of time by economic measures).

When I started into Ridiculous Scorping, that’s when my seats developed crisp lines with no tearing. It was – stupidly – time-consuming. But it wasn’t practice on a practice piece of scrap with no skin in the game good lord jesus did I just make a sports reference?