As a young man, I believed the true measure of a man lay in his ability to master a craft. Not merely to participate in something, but to become it—to bend one’s identity around a skill so completely that the line between the man and the work disappears. A master is someone who, through quiet repetition and relentless dedication, transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. I imagined such men as existing in rarefied spaces—at the potter’s wheel, at the forge, in the dim light of a workshop. Charles Frederic Ulrich’s The Glass Engraver captures this ideal in haunting detail: a man absorbed in his labor, turning glass into memory, one stroke at a time. I see him now as the person I once aspired to be—precise, focused, and wholly committed to the quiet pursuit of excellence.
In the painting, the engraver works alone. His back is turned to the viewer, suggesting not secrecy, but absorption. The world outside the window blurs against the clarity of his tools: rows of grinding wheels, a heavy vise, scattered cloths and bottles. This is not the workspace of a hobbyist but of a professional—a man who has shaped his environment around a single purpose. The light from the window illuminates the glass in his hand, but also the intensity of his gaze, his posture curved into the very rhythm of the work. The writer Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” This engraver has chosen, without apology or distraction, to spend his life in service of his craft. He is the embodiment of that quote.
Yet as I reflect on my own life, I realize I have taken a different path entirely.
Rather than mastery, I’ve leaned into multiplicity. I am a teacher by profession, and now a doctoral student in leadership—roles that require not singularity but breadth. My days demand flexibility, not repetition; curiosity, not expertise. I’ve flirted with mastery over the years—I’ve picked up musical instruments with the hope that one might unlock something innate, something destined. But I always reached a plateau, a moment where I could no longer pretend that talent and time would meet in the middle. As Malcolm Gladwell famously suggests, “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” I have given ten hours here, a hundred there, but never ten thousand to one thing. I couldn’t. My mind wouldn’t sit still long enough.
Now, as I inch closer to earning a doctorate, I again find myself standing at the threshold of knowledge and wondering whether I’ve built anything lasting. The field of leadership—particularly educational leadership—often feels like a house of mirrors, full of reflections but few solid walls. The literature is bloated with acronyms, flowcharts, and tidy mantras that rarely survive contact with the chaos of a real school. I’ve read all the books, but find myself less inspired by each—a variation on a theme that feels more like a broken record than an original composition. The deeper I go, the more I hear echoes of what John Gardner once described as the difference between leaders and “peddlers of self-help pap.” The language is familiar, but the substance feels increasingly hollow.
I can’t help but compare that feeling to the world Ulrich paints. The glass engraver is not working from a manual filled with bullet points and buzzwords. His knowledge is embedded in his hands, in the hundreds of hours spent learning how pressure changes with each kind of glass, how mistakes cannot be undone but must be worked into the final design. There’s no committee, no professional development session, no keynote speaker. Just one man and the slow, intimate dance between tool and material. It is, in every sense, real work.
Still, I return to the classroom. Still, I meet students where they are, answer texts late at night, celebrate tiny victories that most will never see. My work may lack the elegance of an engraved goblet, but I am beginning to see it as its own kind of craftsmanship. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.” That line reminds me that my craft is not measured in polish but in presence. It is not the engraved line, but the conversation that lingers, the question that echoes. Perhaps I have been measuring myself by the wrong standard. Perhaps mastery is not always about narrowing down but about opening up—about the ability to hold many things, many people, many stories at once, and to make meaning in that complexity.
And yet, I still feel the ache. I can’t unlearn the longing for mastery, even if I now understand that my craft is broader, messier, and harder to frame on a wall. The painter gives us a still moment, but life moves. My work is motion. It is improvisation. It is—at times—fumbling and uncertain. But maybe that’s its own kind of artistry. Maybe, like glass engraving, it leaves marks that are only visible when held up to the right light.
I do not know if I will ever feel the deep contentment of the man in the painting. I don’t know if he even feels it himself. But I know the longing is mine, and that it has shaped the questions I ask, the paths I take, the standards I hold. And maybe that’s enough—to honor the desire, to understand its shape, and to keep going anyway. Not toward mastery, perhaps, but toward meaning. Toward a life etched with intention, even if the design remains unfinished.