He was by no means a marvelous man, nor, properly speaking, a genius —
yet I will not pretend that his was an ordinary character among workmen.
George Eliot · Adam Bede
click to continue
enter the workshop
On principle, craft, and service.
Essays, principles, and free tools — from the workshop of Ted Delicath.
Plate I. Dodger Stadium, April 25, 1976
Adam, you perceive, was by no means a marvelous man, nor, properly speaking, a genius, yet I will not pretend that his was an ordinary character among workmen…
He was not an average man.
Yet such men possess an inheritance of emotions nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skillful, courageous labor.
They make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as painstaking, honest men, with the skill and conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighborhood where they dwelt, but you are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some company, or some hospital with which their names are associated by one or two generations after them.
Their employers were the richer for them, the work of their hands has worn well, and the work of their brains has guided well the hands of other men.
They are men of trust, and when they retire, the master who employed them says: ‘Where shall I find their like?’
George Eliot, Adam BedeProject I.
Are you tired of your say–do gap?
“The best apology is changed behavior.”
