• I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing ….7 Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

• “If you leave me alone for a day … I’ll have a joyful time rotating between carpentry, weight training, writing, playing around with instruments in the music studio, making lists and executing tasks from them.”

• Today, however, it’s easier than ever before to power down these circuits. “Many people experience the world largely through a screen now,” Rogowski writes.20 “We live in a world that is working to eliminate touch as one of our senses, to minimize the use of our hands to do things except poke at a screen.” The result is a mismatch between our equipment and our experience. When you use craft to leave the virtual world of the screen and instead begin to work in more complex ways with the physical world around you, you’re living truer to your primal potential.

• In a culture where screens replace craft, Crawford argues, people lose the outlet for self-worth established through unambiguous demonstrations of skill.

• But as Crawford implies, these digital cries for attention are often a poor substitute for the recognition generated by handicraft, as they’re not backed by the hard-won skill required to tame the “infallible judgment” of physical reality, and come across instead as “the boasts of a boy.”

• Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride.

• Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

• The secret to Snakes & Lattes’ success is that it’s a board game café: you enter with a group of friends, are assigned a table, and then can select any game you want to play from the café’s extensive library. If you need help, a game sommelier can make recommendations. The success of this café is somewhat puzzling, as analog games were supposed to disappear in a digital world.

• David Sax argues that this popularity is due in large part to the social experience of playing these games. “Tabletop gaming creates a unique social space apart from the digital world,” he writes.

• “On a social level, video games are decidedly low bandwidth compared to the experience of playing a game on a square of flat cardboard with another human being.”

• Aristotle argued that high-quality leisure is essential to a life well lived.

• When this six-week experiment ends, you won’t quite be ready to rebuild the engine on your Honda, but you’ll have achieved entry-level handy status. That is, just enough competence to realize you’re capable of learning new things, and to realize that you enjoy doing so. If you’re like most, this six-week crash course will spark a persistent and rewarding inclination toward getting your hands dirty.

• I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings.41 The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.

• Inspired by these meetings, Franklin created a scheme in which the Junto members would contribute funds toward buying books that all members could use.

• Few can mimic the energy Franklin invested into his social leisure, but we can all extract an important lesson from his approach to cultivating a fulfilling leisure life: join things.

• In the professional world, many high achievers are meticulous strategists. They lay out a vision for what they’re trying to accomplish on multiple different time scales, connecting high-level ambition to decisions about daily actions.

• Becoming more systematic about your leisure, in other words, can significantly increase the relaxation you enjoy throughout your week.