Welcome to Diary of a Maker
Diary of a Maker™ is about coming home to craft. It’s about rediscovering wonder, peace, and joy. Reclaiming the creative expression that comes from making things with your heart and hands. It’s about being inspired, learning from others, and sharing the journey!
Why Craft Matters Now More Than Ever.
Your creative impulse isn’t gone…it’s just “gone quiet.”
When we were kids, we used our imaginations and our hands to do pretty much everything. Building, fixing, crafting, making things we could touch and feel and share. All day, every day.
We may not have called ourselves artists (still might not). But, we were all makers. Constantly dreaming up things, and figuring out how to make them real.
It wasn't just play, it was how we discovered who we were, expressed our creativity, shaped our identity, navigated the world, and shared our sense of self, our taste and style with those around us.
It was also just plain fun. We lost time, in the best of ways.
Grown-up work, screens, grumpiness & AI.
In our rush toward productivity, conforming to the world of grown-ups and work, we traded our maker’s soul for the endless scroll.
Screens and machines replaced hands and tools. Thinking, efficiency, and deadlines replaced feeling, creativity, and play. And, now, with AI devouring so much of the creative process, we’re unwittingly stripping away so much of what makes our lives feel truly connected and alive. What makes us feel, well, human.
We’re forgetting the most important lesson…
We don’t make things just to have them exist in the world. We make them because the process of creation changes us.
When we swap screens, prompts, and speed for hands, raw materials, and space, we lose a piece of our humanity along the way. Which is exactly what so many of us have done. And, we’ve been silently grieving the loss, without even realizing where the suffering is coming from.
Making or doing things with our hands teaches us how to dream, how to navigate uncertainty and adversity, how to overcome failure, how to change and adapt, how to work with elements we can’t easily control, and how to make not just beautiful things, but also beautiful lives.
Your hands remember…
…what your mind has forgotten.
It’s time to come home to the part of yourself you tucked away years ago, in the name of being an “adult.”
To power down your devices, and power up your hands. To return to craft. To make things you can touch and feel. Things that drop you back into your body, and unfold in their own time. Things where it’s not about efficiency and productivity, but about discovery and delight.
In a world of AI and algorithms, coming home to craft isn’t just a hobby. It’s a reclamation. An act of resistance. This is not nostalgia. It’s survival.
It’s time to wake up our hearts and hands.
Join the Diary of a Maker™ movement & come home to craft.
I’m Jonathan Fields, bestselling author, host of the top-ranked Good Life Project® podcast…and lifelong maker.
I’ve made a lot of things in my life. But, the deeper truth is, like so many, I’d largely abandoned working with my hands for decades. Until a single experience, working side-by-side with a guitar builder to craft my own instrument, reminded me how deeply connected we are to the experience of shaping raw materials into things we can touch and feel and share.
It brought me back home to my hands, to my own, personal maker’s journey, and transformed my life.
And, it became the inspiration to create something bigger. An invitation for more of us to get our hands dirty again. To play with wood, clay, metal, paint, pens, paper, fabric, yarn, dough, whatever speaks to you. To create things that exist in the real world. And, to let ourselves be changed and creatively expressed along the way.
This is the vision behind Diary of a Maker.
I’ll be traveling the world, sitting down with extraordinary craftspeople, artisans, bakers, builders, and makers. Filming intimate, visual mini-documentaries. Inviting you into their studios, workshops, and play-spaces. Think Chef’s Table for Makers.
We’ll see and hear their origin stories, learn how they’ve developed their craft, and then watch them teach us a bit of their magic. We’ll also mix in lush ASMR-fueled visual maker experiences for you to drop into, to be taken away by.
Along the way, I’ll be sharing my own, personal return to craft.
My own Diary of a Maker, trying my hand at a wide range of new projects, art-forms, and adventures every month, from painting and print-making to woodworking, welding, metal-smithing, knitting, and more.
Then, inviting you into the experiences through evocative, multi-sensory photo-essays, videos, and collective awakenings in our monthly Diary of a Maker newsletter.
It’s all about embracing a beginner’s mind, setting aside perfectionism, and celebrating the slow, joyful process of creating physical, tangible things again. Documenting the journey, the joys, the fumbles, stumbles, and outright failures, the humor, learning and reconnection with a sense of freedom, forgiveness, discovery, and play.
We’ll also be growing a connected, global community of people from all walks of life. Artists and makers, sure. But, also everyone from careerists and caretakers to professionals, technologists, and anyone else who is feeling the soul-loss that comes from living in a world defined by screens and machines, and jonesing to get back to the simple joy of making things with your hands.
No experience necessary. No prerequisites. This isn’t about mastery, it’s about making a life.
We’ll also be spotlighting members of the Diary of a Maker community, inviting you to share a page from your own maker’s journey.
And over time, we’ll be building a directory of maker experiences, from half-day or evening workshops to week-long or even months-long programs or residencies, led by everyone from local, individual artisans to full-fledged schools of craft. Helping you find opportunities and experiences to explore near you. We want to help make it as easy as possible for you to come home to craft. Even if you’ve never done it before. It’s in there. Always has been. You just have to reawaken it.
Diary of a Maker is about all of us…
It’s a grassroots movement of people just like you, reclaiming creativity, rekindling joy, and reconnecting with the childlike wonder of making. Together, we're pushing back against a world spiraling into digital abstraction and artificial intelligence, grounding ourselves once more in the authentic and real. Things we can touch, craft, and feel.
Diary of a Maker is about awakening your inner maker along the way, no matter how long it’s been dormant. It’s about you saying yes to the creative part of you that’s been stifled, perpetually asleep since you were a kid.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence, heart, and reclaiming what it means to be fully human. And doing it in community.
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Ready to take back your creativity, your heart, and your humanity?
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