John, one of the things that people who go straight from school to a career of symbol manipulation often miss is the vast difference between talking about a thing and doing it – a sense of how hard it is to really accomplish anything tangible.

Here is a fantastic article from The New Atlantis (h/t Rod Dreher) written by a guy who left his Washington, DC think tank job to run a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. Here’s a sample:

I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.
I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in a commercial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked.

My guess is that he took a writing class somewhere along the way, too.