The Five Elements

In Life-as-a-Craft, there are five master categories that organize almost every subject or interest you will have over your entire lifetime. That means whatever you are interested in learning or must learn to succeed in life, can be managed as part of an interconnected system, and not a random collection of ‘stuff’.

The Five Elements

1. Family & Personal Heritage — Where you come from, where you are now, and the legacy you will leave to future generations. This Element organizes the collection of topics that first imprint us in our lives, and we carry with us often unconsciously.
2. Family & Household Management — The home you grew up in, the home you are making right now, or will make in the future. All the topics in this category focus on making sure your home is a well run ‘workshop’ for all family members to thrive.
3. Family & Personal Finance — What you learn personally about managing money, and how you and your household partner skillfully manage money together, can make or break a financially successful household.
4. The Human Being — What you know about yourself, and how you treat your inner self and your outer self including your diet, your career, and managing your emotions.
5. Tools for Living — What tools you use in your life, and how skillful you are at using them. This Element is to help you name and separate tools which assist you to achieve improved results in any endeavor if you are trained and use them skillfully.

What’s the Objective for Doing This?

In some places and cultures across the world, some people are raised in a family & personal heritage that defines the mechanics of the world, and one’s place in it. Providing many with a pre-defined sense of purpose, and context for the activites of daily life.

For others, the world is presented as an encounter of random unconnected experiences that you must figure out as you go, flying blindly by the seat of your pants, and navigating by intuition, trial, and error. For some this is exciting. For others, this uncertainty results in a deep sense of anxiety and a desire for more structure and stability often found in our careers and places of work, but not in the wider spaces of our lives.

A framework for organizing your life curriculum

The idea is a simple one; what if we were educated that ‘life’ – a span of approximately 80 years – was a structured ‘craft’, organized within a framework; similar to a school curriculum containing all the different subjects we might choose to learn and practice during our lifetime.

Life-as-a-Craft is an alternative to experiencing life partially blindfolded; as if seeing only through one eye. It is like having the jig-saw puzzle box top on the table in front of you, to refer to as you fit the pieces together.

The Five Elements of Life-as-a-Craft, are an organizing structure for all the content you have learned in your life thus far, and a guide for more easily finding, and learning new content and skills as you move forward across the Four Phases of your life.