Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. Would you like to know something that is useful in order to really start to see progress with your pottery and start to see that you are actually good at making pottery? Well, I'll tell you this. It's really simple. All you have to do is just do repetitions and repetitions and repetitions. Repetition is the easiest way
Speaker: to really see progress in your pottery. Well, when we first start, we're all gonna suck. We're all gonna have these really crappy days where we're not gonna be able to make anything for probably months, weeks, maybe months on end. And it can really suck though, but there's an easy cure to that. And that is repetition.
Speaker: Now recently I interviewed Dolores Farmer and in the episode that I was interviewing her we began to talk about some advice that she would give to beginners and the advice that she said was that people try to make what they can't really make and instead of they try to make a 10 inch vase
Speaker: And she gives the advice, instead of trying to make a 10 inch face, why don't you make a bunch of five inch faces? And she begins to say, look how many things you made just for making a bunch of five inch faces. And you know, when she said that I resonated with that so much because that's exactly what I did when I was first learning how to make pottery. I didn't really know how to make a bunch of things. I knew the basics of making things, but I didn't really, I wasn't really good at it.
Speaker: But what I did was I found one thing that I really liked to make at that time. And for me, that was mugs. I focused solely on mugs. I made tons of mugs. I still have a bunch of mugs in my house. And because I focus solely on making mugs, I got really good at making mugs. And by getting really good at making mugs, just doing that single thing over and over and over again,
Speaker: it began to help me when I was ready and wanting to start expanding my pottery world and because I did so many mugs and I kept on doing them trying to get it better and better and better and better what happened was I became it became so much easier when I wanted to make bigger vases
Speaker: And that's how we should be applying repetition to our pottery. I say that we should find one thing that we really want to go deep at in our pottery world when we're first starting out. You can branch off every now and then, but I think that we should be focusing in on one thing and just repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat until we're good at making that one thing that we make. It doesn't matter what you want to make.
Speaker: But if you get good at one thing first, then you're going to see so much progress when you learn other things. Recently, I've been reading a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's an amazing book and it teaches you a lot about habits. And one of the chapters, it gave an example of this professor from a university.
Speaker: Basically he was a professor that taught photography and in his class he divided the group, the students into two groups. One group was a quantity group and they had to make a hundred photographs to get an A. The second group was a group that had to make, turn in one photograph but had to be perfect in order to get an A. Now
Speaker: The difference between those two is really simple. One just had to do repeat and repeat and repeat pictures all the time. While by the end of the year, the group that was supposed to have the one perfect picture, it was a lot harder to get A's because they only had one picture that they really needed.
Speaker: The second group, however, had a bunch of pictures. They had over, they had hundreds of pictures that they had to turn in. And each one got better and better and better and better because they were focusing in on, to keep on repetition and repetition and repetition. And that's what that can do for your pottery as well.
Speaker: If you just keep on focusing in and you just repeat, repetition, repetition and build your skill slowly, not everything is going to come fast, but if you build it slowly, you're going to see progress later on.
Speaker: And in that book also, Atomic Habics, he explains that progress isn't a linear path. It's like a very curve. It starts out very, very slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, and you shoot off like a rocket. That's how it is for pottery as well. So the next time you think about, oh, I want to make this 10 inch vase, try making a bunch of five inch vases first.
Speaker: you'll see the progress that you'll make and eventually you'll be able to make 10 inch faces with ease. Thank you, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
