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#10 Fail Often and Fast
46 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of Shaping Your Pottery I talk about failure. Failure is a really great way to improve your pottery and help you find your own style. Don't be afraid of failure if you fail so what try to learn something from it. If you can learn anything from your failures that is a win.
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Transcript
The Role of Failure in Learning Pottery
00:00:01
Speaker
Fail, fail, and fail some more. Welcome to Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. In this episode, I'm gonna be talking about the God Almighty thing that helps potters in every single way, and that is failure. Failure is one of those things that obviously nobody wants to do. It's hard, it can be frustrating sometimes to fail, it can really put you down and your mood can just go way down. But the thing about failure is
00:00:31
Speaker
is that you need it, especially in pottery, because it's the easiest way to learn and it's the best way to learn. If you can learn from your failures or your mistakes, then you can really start to conquer pottery and anything else. Allow me to tell you
Nick's Personal Journey with Failure
00:00:48
Speaker
a story before I go on with my rest of my point. So back when I was maybe 19 years old, I would say, I was really
00:01:00
Speaker
I just bought my wheel and I really wanted to make the perfect pottery but at the same time I didn't want to get rid of anything. So I was making a lot of pots and a lot of pots and while I was failing a lot of times because I didn't really know how to make pottery the way I wanted, I was still keeping the pottery that I wanted and that's a pretty big fail right there because if you keep
00:01:30
Speaker
everything that you are making, then you're not going to learn from what really sparks you. So you have to fail and fail and fail in order to kind of find what works for you, find your own style, find something that really inspires you. At the time I was making a lot of mugs and I was keeping all of the mugs.
Embracing Failure for Creative Expansion
00:01:54
Speaker
and I remember I didn't really have enough money to buy some clay so I had to decide which ones I didn't want to keep and which ones I wanted to keep which ones were more suited to my style at that time so I had to I chose there's probably maybe I would say a hundred mugs hundred pieces hundred pots
00:02:14
Speaker
out of those hundred pots I probably only kept about ten because I didn't I didn't like the rest of them they were all pretty shitty in my opinion and I didn't like that so I Took those the the pots I didn't like and I recycled them and then I redid the process all over and I kept on doing that until I was satisfied with my results and I
00:02:39
Speaker
Because of the failures of the ones that I didn't like, I was able to really find something that I completely enjoyed. And not only that, my shift from just making mugs, it changed to making bases, bowls, planters, and a whole bunch of other things. It shifted my
Consensus Among Potters on Failure
00:02:59
Speaker
whole way because I was able to see things from a new perspective from my failures. And now,
00:03:07
Speaker
One of the biggest things that has come across from the people that I've interviewed is failures. They all say that you have to fail and fail a lot in order to really get good at this pottery game. And I completely agree. You have to fail in order to learn. And that is one of the best things that I have probably learned from interviewing people.
00:03:32
Speaker
other potters as well and that is the easiest way to kind of find your own style it may be the most kind of difficult at the same time because it can be pretty discouraging
00:03:44
Speaker
But if you don't look at it as a failure when you mess up or you don't make something that you like and you think of it in a way of how can I make this better for next time? What can I do next time so that I can achieve the results I want? You're going to see a lot more progress with your pottery and really anything else that you want.
Redefining Failure and Inviting Feedback
00:04:08
Speaker
I like this quote that I heard from Tony Robbins a while ago. He said that we don't fail because we mess up. We fail because we quit or we stop. And that really resonated with me because I thought that was super true.
00:04:26
Speaker
That is super true because if you quit, that's when you fail. As long as you're not quitting, you're not failing. You may mess up, you may mess up a lot and it may be frustrating, but you're not failing. You're getting a new way of doing things. Failure is not failure unless you quit. So the next time you are frustrated that you're not really making a potter that you want or that nothing is going your way,
00:04:56
Speaker
Try and think of a new direction. Think of the failure and what you're able to learn from it. If you're able to learn anything from anything that you mess up, then that's a win. If you can learn anything when you mess up, that's a win. Thank you. I hope you guys have a great day. Let me hear your thoughts. Leave a review and let me know what you think about this episode.