You Move Too Fast

In my oft-used marketing spiel to executives about building awareness campaigns, I often used the potter’s wheel analogy. Executives as a type are eager to demonstrate and push to get quick results. But quick doesn’t always translate to “best” or even to “better.”

Every bowl that is thrown starts with the proverbial pound of clay thrown onto the wheel. As the wheel begins to turn, the potter engages with the clay in a mutually creative endeavor. The wheel starts to spin, slowly at first, and the water is thrown on the clay. The potter gets into the slurry with his/her hands.

It is a common mistake for newbie potters to have difficulty controlling the shape and speed of the bowl or vessel they want to make. Therein lies the craft. The slow, steady coaching of that amorphous lump of clay into an object of beauty and utility is not easy. I learned that in a pottery class.

My New Brunswick potter friend, Tom Smith, who make beautiful raku mugs and sold them by the hundreds, chuckled when I told him that, and said: “We love pottery courses. It’s the quickest way people really find out how hard it is to do what we do.”

New potters let the clay get away from them. The clay can flop over precariously in one direction or another. Hold the clay too long or too firmly and the undisciplined form rushes upwards through your fingers. Speaking personally, flailing about with your hands and fingers trying to tame and pull the wayward clay back into submission is a fool’s errand.

The emerging product on the wheel looks more like an ostrich in need of a chiropractor than anything remotely resembling a serving dish. Once the clay has reached a certain height, there is little option but to scrap the whole project and start over from scratch.

The potter may have learned valuable lessons in this botched attempt. Still, it may have cost considerable time and effort. The corporate world doesn’t graciously allow, or forgive, much botching. Ergo my caution to eager executives to build a campaign slowly and methodically for the best outcome to their marketing/sales/communication plans.

It feels like we have lost our trust in process and investing the necessary time, often years, to perfect our craft. What used to be called apprenticeship seems to have gone extinct along with the late lamented dodo bird.

Writers bandy about a story about meeting a brain surgeon at a cocktail party who declares to the author: “After retirement, I am going to write a book.” To which the author replies: “Isn’t that funny? I was thinking that after I leave my writing career behind, I am going to take up brain surgery.”

Point made but likely lost on the surgeon who could likely never equate the intricacies of his craft with what writers do. Everyone can write, they reason. Which is true, I guess, if qualitatively variant. Writers are used to insensitivity about the actual skill and rigor required to practice their practice.

As Ringo Starr would put it: “You know it don’t come easy.”

Lately I have been having two key thoughts. Some empathy and concern about young people lulled into believing they are “ready for prime time” long before they know what “prime time” even is.

It used to take years to become an overnight success. Today any cute kid with a shtick can publish, perform and profit from an online presence. My question always is, “But for how long?” I wonder how long their audience will continue to be enthralled by make-up application videos once they have aged out into the real work world, had babies and are trying to snag a mortgage.

I am as guilty of techno-distraction as the next person. But I am trying to find a way out of that dependence. I want to revel in the joy that comes from sitting at a potter’s wheel for hours creating pot after pot with well-behaved lumps of clay. (Full confession, I don’t ever expect to get there. But I can dream, can’t I?)

I want to lose myself in amazing books that transport me. Almost anywhere. I’m selective, of course. I prefer to traipse through the mysteries of the heart, mind and soul. Some authors manage to take me on that journey. I often opt for trusted experts who have taught me more in a week with their book than I might otherwise have learned in years.

All to say, I feel an urge to slow down. Not as a surrender to the vagaries of age but to the value and quality of time. Satisfying as completing tasks may be, I don’t see countless hours knocking items off my to-do list as the memories I wish to savor on my deathbed.

I want to spend more time with family, friends and loved ones. I want to spend more time with myself. I want to spend more time in my garden. Yesterday, the HASS avocado tree we ordered arrived. I am beyond excited to see how it grows.

Note to self: Slow down long enough and frequently enough to make sure you can enjoy the process. Big work for a Type A personality like me, but necessary.