The Red Thread This Week:
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
Paul Valéry
My daughter started making pottery in middle school, right around the time the general weather of being a teenager rolled in. The anxiety about school, about where she fit, about all of it.
Ceramics gave her somewhere to put her hands.
I'd watch her sit down with a lump of clay and come back up a few hours later with something she was proud of, and somehow seeming a bit lighter than when she started. As a parent, that was a gift to witness. She found a real release-valve in the work.
I've watched her make pottery for years now, and the way my brain works, the craft throws off more metaphors than pottery.
The sharp tools that make you focus. The way most of the work is taking away. No such thing as “wrong”, just an unexpected outcome to consider. Plenty to chew on there.
But my favorite is probably this: the final piece is never really finished.
She can always smooth a lip a little more, sand an edge, add a touch more color. There's no point where the piece stands up and announces it's done.
She has to decide that. She has to stop.
She has to reach an appropriate level of doneness that allows her to move on to the next piece.
Some of her work
I spent years playing music and making records, and the most valuable things we ever paid for were mechanisms that forced us to stop. Paid studio time (not our home studios), the good ears of an outside producer and engineer, the final mix done somewhere else, on the clock.
Most of the money and the hours didn't go into the songs themselves. They went into the support system around us that made it possible to finally say, this is it, we're done, no more.
Being your own boss means nobody walks in to tell you the work is finished.
Not the deck, not the site, not the product, not the ad copy or social post. You can polish any of them forever, and polishing feels like progress, so you hide there.
But every hour spent smoothing a lip is an hour not spent starting the next piece.
A body of meaningful work gets built by people who learn to call it. When nobody is coming to say when, you're the only one who can.
~ Jaime
P.S. But what do you think? Hit reply, let me know. If nothing landed, tell me that too. I read every one.
Thanks for spending time with Red Threads. I’m glad you’re here.
Red Threads is presented by:
Stop typing what you could say in 10 seconds.
Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text inside any app. Emails, Slack, client updates — speak once, send without editing. 4x faster than typing.