Feeling unfulfilled? Tired? Empty?
Do you sit staring at screens all day feeling the digital overload that everyone talks about constantly but never does anything about?
Maybe it’s time to get your head out of The Cloud and actually do something, y’know… with your digits.
Turns out the best way to get your hands dirty in the business/startup world might be to literally get your hands dirty.
Who’d have thought?
I don’t claim to have “The Secret,” and I haven’t been on Oprah yet. But anecdotally, I’d say that people who work with their hands are on to something.
Working manually (literally with your hands) just seems to make a lot of creative digital nomad-types feel a little bit more fulfilled, even if it’s just part of the time when they’re away from their digital, less-tangible work.
On some level, it helps you feel a greater sense of autonomy in the world—like you have more control. It reminds you that you can—literally—mold things the way you want, and you’re not a spectator watching a drawn-out cutscene in a video game that doesn’t let you hit X to skip.
Indeed, actually working with physical objects in the age of doom scrolling and endless TikToks can feel “oddly satisfying.”
Folks who spend their workday completely in the digital world tend to end up with this vague sense of how much control they have—either they feel way more powerful than they are, or they feel powerless, with nothing really in between.
But take those same people and give them things they can manipulate with their hands—sculpting, woodworking, metal fabrication, tattoo art, gardening, even working with electronics—and suddenly they have a keener sense of how much they can really do. For a lot of people, that’s huge—it can bring even the most “extremely online” people back to reality in a positive way.
Why can working with our hands be so relaxing? When we work with them today, we actually give our overloaded brains a chance to rest. It doesn’t mean working with hands necessarily takes less knowledge—not at all.
It means that rather than putting 99% of the work load on one part of the body (the brain) and 1% on our fingers for typing, we’re spreading out the load so one area isn’t constantly struggling to work as hard. This is why as backwards as it might sound at first, with the digital lifestyles most of us are used to living these days, doing hands-on work is now relaxing for many people.
Ever stuck working behind a screen and find yourself fantasizing about cleaning something in another room, or pulling out your tools and getting to an overdue repair? That’s not just procrastination.
It’s even good for depression—doing manual tasks releases serotonin and endorphins and reduces levels of cortisol (“the stress hormone”).
You entrepreneurs are thinking, “Yeah, great, it’s good for your brain, cool cool—but can you actually make money working with your hands?”
Hell yeah.
Let’s look at just one example—starting a woodworking business. During the pandemic, a number of people have started businesses at home by converting spare rooms, garages, or sheds into workshops.
For a lot of these people who lost their computer-centric jobs over the past couple years, creating a home woodworking workshop is the thing that allowed them to stay passionate about their work—or become passionate in the first place.
No, it’s not easy. Are they all profitable in the first few months? No.
All new business owners face struggles, challenges, and cash flow problems.
The key—and this applies to basically every other “work with your hands” startup business idea—is finding your niche, filling it well, and sticking with it.
Don’t respect wood? You have other options. The average yearly take-home for metal fabricators is $29,000 to $55,000 a year.
In 2022, the average entry level salary for a tattoo artist is $26,000 a year—with a median salary of $61,000 a year.
How about being a chef? Being a barista? Welding? Hairstyling? Carpentry? Massage therapy? Glass blowing? Baking? Becoming an arborist? Hell, being a casino dealer?
It’s super cliche, yeah, but the limit is your imagination.
This next part’s a little personal, but one thing I’ve learned as a typical new homeowner—continually trying to save money by learning skills I previously thought I had no place getting involved in—is that many of these things are easier than you might expect them to be. And from there it doesn’t take much to see how one could start a lucrative, fulfilling side hustle doing that work for other people.
For a specific instance, it wasn’t until I first drilled through sheet metal with a standard drill like it was butter that I truly believed it was possible to do so—I kept thinking I must be interpreting the online instructions wrong, it must take some serious industrial strength tools, and someone much better than me in every way to drill a hole through a piece of metal.
My point is not just that these kind of things are good for your brain and you should try them, but that sometimes it just takes attempting hands on work in the first place to realize you’re fully capable of doing it.
And boy is that weirdly fulfilling on its own.
Be careful, though. You might end up discovering how much you prefer working with actual, physical, feel-able objects instead of… whatever you’re supposed to be doing in that Adobe Illustrator window?
Oh. It crashed. Nevermind.
