The Clockmaker's Second Apprentice

A clockmaker in a mountain town once took on two apprentices in the same spring. They were, by every visible measure, equally promising. Both were seventeen. Both had steady hands and the kind of eye for small things that clockwork demands. Both had, the master noted approvingly in his ledger, arrived at the shop ten minutes early on their first day.

The first apprentice learned quickly. Within a season he could take apart a pocket watch and put it back together without notes. Within a year he could regulate a mantel clock so precisely that the master's wealthiest customers began to ask for him specifically. He was, everyone in the town agreed, a natural.

The second apprentice learned more slowly. He was not less able; he was less finished. He asked strange questions. He wanted to know why the escapement had been designed the way it had, and whether the shape of the pallet could be improved, and what the old Dutch clockmakers had done differently in the seventeenth century, and whether the shop's oldest movement — a thing the master had inherited and never quite understood — could be made to keep better time by re-cutting a single gear. He was, everyone in the town agreed, a bit odd.

At the end of ten years, the first apprentice opened his own shop across town and did very well. He became, in due course, the finest clockmaker of his generation in the region. He was in every way successful. He was also, though he did not use the word himself, bored.

The second apprentice spent those same ten years finishing every day of work with an hour at the bench doing what he called 'the extra hour'. He did not repair anything in the extra hour. He did not earn anything. He simply took a small problem — one he had noticed during the day but not had time to think about — and turned it slowly under a lamp until he understood something new. Most of the hours produced nothing. A few, over the years, produced small improvements that changed how he built. One, in the seventh year, produced a new kind of temperature-compensated balance that the trade eventually adopted.

By year fifteen the second apprentice was not merely a clockmaker. He was the person clockmakers wrote to. He was not much richer than his old classmate. He was, in the sense that matters most, in a different profession entirely — one built by the compound interest of a thousand extra hours.

There is a difference between doing your work and improving your work, and it is almost invisibly small on any given day. Over ten years it is the difference between a career and a craft. You do not need to leave your job to get it. You need one hour, most days, in which you are not billing anyone — including yourself.