About Handwerk and Yoori
I am glad you made it here. Given we are both new here, I figure I introduce myself and the reason I started Handwerk.
In the last decade, I made a career in marketing for a major hospitality company and moved across cities, states, countries and continents, always chasing the next thing. A promotion, a bigger house, a better place to live. Growing up in an Asian house-hold, there has always been pressure on performance and a notion that I need to suffer in order to get to a better place. So I spent a lot of time training, moving, chasing promotions - changing all the circumstances around me to create the ‘perfect’ environment to be happy and content. But - spoiler alert - it didn’t happen. I lived the glitzy life. From work dinners at award winning restaurants in Moscow to elaborate conferences in Istanbul, building a team, switching careers into tech - everything looked great on paper, but I was feeling empty and restless.
Today I am the happiest I have ever been. Because I now know that the things that give me joy have always been there, I just haven’t been paying attention while chasing the next thing. It’s the small pieces in the everyday that count. And here is how I was able to start seeing them:
The first part is about committing to train and exercise that joy muscle - slowing down, seeing and creating those moments of joy. It sounds so simple but once I started putting work into small moments of joy that a shift happened in the bigger picture of happiness.
The second part is to surround myself with things and people that I love and eliminate the noise around it - everything else.
And anyone who knows me knows that once I make up my mind, I’m all go and I will push through the goals that I set myself. So I went hard. I quit my job (multiple times), pursued countless hobbies. Almost 10 years ago I sold almost everything I owned and went to live traveling the world with two suitcases and a dog. Maybe you can relate - you initiated big changes in your life or you are daydreaming about escaping your day to day. But let me tell you that while this can take your life into a great direction, it’s not the solution to it all.
I had amazing experiences, but I also spiraled with the sheer influx of experiences. What really fulfilled me wasn’t the exotic location, it was setting up my routines wherever I went. Amongst the few things I traveled with were my favorite mug, favorite cereal bowl and set of cutlery. I had selected them carefully and it always brought a smile to my face unpacking my suitcase and putting these into the cupboards of the next AirBnB. They weren’t perfect, they weren’t expensive. But they were what I intentionally selected. And this is where my joy-practice started. Though we cannot control all aspects of our lives, we do have the opportunity to bring things into our lives that bring us joy. And we can take inventory of everything around us - nature, animals, light, physical goods, food - and find joy in their beauty. And boy is it easy to overlook (I had been doing that for decades!), but once my internal eye was trained on those little beautiful joyful moments, I found that really, it is everywhere. And I truly believe that this is a practice and is accessible to everyone.