The bent instrument
Your Brain Is Lying to You in Here. Mine Is Too.
Nobody in this building is seeing the same room you are. Not one of them. Here is what all of our brains get wrong in a place like mine, why none of it is fixable, and what I have learned to do with it anyway.
By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah.
Somebody holds up a mug.
It is a good mug. Even walls, a handle that actually fits a hand, a foot that sits flat on a table without rocking. Six weeks ago this person could not center.
And here is what they say about it.
“Sorry. It is a little lopsided.”
It is not lopsided. I am looking right at it.
I have watched that exact moment happen in my building more times than I could count, and it still gets me, because they are not fishing and they are not being modest. They are describing a defect that is not there. They can see it. I cannot, and I have been doing this a long time.
Meanwhile, ten feet away, somebody is holding a pot with a crack running clean through the base and telling me it will be fine.
Same room. Same light. Same clay.
How do two people in one building end up looking at the same shelf and seeing two different shelves?
So I went down a rabbit hole about this, which is what I do at one in the morning instead of sleeping.
The thing I was looking for has a name. Cognitive bias. Which is an ugly piece of vocabulary for a very simple idea.
Your brain does not have time to actually look at a room. There is too much room. So it guesses. It guesses constantly, it guesses fast, and the guess is usually close enough that you never find out it was a guess at all.
But the guesses are not random. That is the part that got me.
They are wrong in the same direction, in nearly everybody, across decades of studies, in every country anyone has bothered to run them in. Your brain is not broken. Mine is not broken either.
We are all just running the same slightly bent instrument.
We are all just running the same slightly bent instrument.
Start with the bend that runs my building.
In 2000, some psychologists made college students put on a t-shirt with Barry Manilow’s face printed across the front of it, then walk into a room full of other students. Afterward they asked the wearer a simple question. How many of those people are going to remember what was on your shirt?
About half, said the wearers.
About a quarter, said the room.
Twice the eyes that were actually on them. They called it the spotlight effect, and in twenty-five years of psychology pulling up its own floorboards and finding rot under half of them, that one has held.
Now put it in a pottery studio.
You are carrying a wobbling bowl across a room with twenty people in it and you can feel every pair of eyes land on the rim. There is a spotlight. You can feel the spotlight on you.
There is no spotlight.
Every person in that room is looking at their own hands and running their own version of the same arithmetic, and feeling their own spotlight, and not one of them has any idea that anybody else in there feels it too.
Twenty people. Twenty spotlights. Zero audience.
Twenty people. Twenty spotlights. Zero audience.
Here is the second one, and this is my favorite one.
After a conversation with somebody new, people are reliably wrong about how it went. They think the other person liked them less than that person actually did. It is called the liking gap, and the brutal detail is how long it hangs around. Researchers followed new college roommates and the gap was still sitting there months later.
Months. People sharing a room.
So that thing where you drive home from a first class replaying the one comment you made about the kiln and deciding you were weird? You were not weird. Or you were, and they liked you anyway, which is the normal result and always has been.
Third one, and this is the one that does the most damage in a place like mine.
When somebody walks past you without saying hi, your brain reaches for their character. They are stuck up. They did not want to talk to me.
When you walk past somebody without saying hi, your brain reaches for the circumstances. I was carrying a board. I was counting. I had a wall going soft and about ninety seconds to save it.
Same event. Two completely different explanations, handed out based on nothing except whose head you happen to be standing in.
I do this at my own front door. Somebody walks in, I say hey, they say nothing back, and my brain has them tried and convicted before they have got their apron on. And then an hour later I find out they had come straight from something awful, and I get to spend the rest of the night being the guy who decided they were rude.
Now here is the part I was hoping would not be true.
You cannot fix any of it by learning about it.
That is the finding that genuinely annoyed me. Knowing the name of a bias does not switch the bias off. People who can define the spotlight effect still feel the spotlight. And there is a bias sitting on top of that one, where almost everybody believes they personally are less biased than the people around them.
I would like to go on record saying I am sure I am the exception.
I am not the exception.
I have read a quiet Tuesday in my own studio as they are all mad at me more times than I am going to admit in writing. I have had four conversations in an evening, three good and one short, and driven home thinking about the short one. Every time. Not sometimes. I own the building, I have read the studies, and the short one still wins the drive home.
So, no. You do not get to debug it. The instrument is bent and it is staying bent.
Which leaves one question worth asking, and it is not the one I started with. What do you do with a brain you cannot talk any sense into?
But, get this.
You cannot change the instrument. You can absolutely change what you point it at.
That is the whole thing I wanted to say, and it took me a thousand words to get here, so let me be concrete about what it looks like on an ordinary Thursday night in a pottery studio.
Pick a night. Keep it.
In 1992 two researchers sent four women into a college lecture hall. One never showed up at all. One came five times, one came ten, one came fifteen. None of them spoke to a single student. Not one word, all semester. At the end the class rated them, and the ratings climbed in order of attendance. The woman they had seen fifteen times and never once met was rated the warmest, the most familiar, and the most like them.
She did nothing. She sat there.
That is a bias, and it is yours, and it works on your side for free. You do not have to be interesting in here. You do not have to be any good. You have to be the person whose face the room has already filed under ours, and the only way through that door is showing up on the same night until it happens. I wrote a whole letter about walking into a room where everybody seems to know each other. Most of the tactics in it are attendance wearing a disguise.
Make the ugly pot in public.
Nobody is watching you. You have a spotlight you are not actually getting, so you may as well spend it. And the one person who does look up gets something out of the deal, because watching somebody else make a bad pot on purpose is the fastest permission slip anybody hands out in this building.
When you leave unsure how it went, assume up.
This is not positive thinking. I have no patience for positive thinking. This is correcting a known error in a known direction, the same way you would adjust a scale that always reads two pounds light. You are wrong about this, predictably, by a measurable amount. So round it the other way and get on with your evening.
Hand out the excuse you keep for yourself.
You already own a generous explanation. The board you were carrying. The ninety seconds. You reach for it automatically every time you are the one who walked past somebody. Give it away first, before you have decided anything, and watch what it does to a week.
Write the good one down somewhere.
One sharp sentence will outlive ten kind ones, because your brain files the sharp one heavier and it is going to keep doing that whatever you think about it. The only counter I have ever found that works is embarrassingly crude. Keep the kind ones. A note on your phone, a text you never delete, a scrap in a drawer.
I have one. I am not telling you what is in it.
And then there is the one that is just a gift.
Researchers had people fold origami and then asked them what it was worth. The folders wanted about five times what anyone else would pay for the same sad paper frog. And when outsiders were shown origami folded by actual experts, they priced the expert work right about where the amateurs had priced their own.
So the amateurs were not being arrogant and they were not being modest. They looked at their own crumpled frog and saw an expert’s.
I know what you are thinking, because I thought it. That is embarrassing. That is a bias I ought to correct.
No. Leave it. Leave that one completely alone.
The lopsided mug on your shelf is worth more than an identical mug you bought at a store. Worth more to who? To you, and that is the only ledger that was ever being kept. Not on the open market, obviously. Nobody here cares about the open market. You put forty minutes and both thumbs into that thing and your brain priced the forty minutes in, which is frankly the most reasonable thing your brain does all day.
Of all the ways this instrument is bent, that is the bend I would never want straightened.
Here is where I landed on all of it.
I used to think the job of running a good room was getting people to see the room accurately. Correct the misreadings. Fix the arithmetic. Explain the kiln.
I do not think that anymore.
You cannot talk somebody out of their own eyes, and I would be a hypocrite for trying, because mine are bent the same way and I have had longer to notice it. So the job is not accuracy. The job is building a room where a wrong reading lands somewhere soft.
That is most of what the rules in here are actually for. Including the ones that sound fussy written down.
None of that comes from thinking people are fragile. It comes from knowing that every single person in this building, me very much included, is working off a slightly wrong instrument, and that the cheapest thing in the world is to stop pretending otherwise and move the furniture accordingly.
You are not paranoid. You are not needy. You are not too sensitive.
You are a person with a guessing brain, in a room full of people with guessing brains. That is all any room has ever been, anywhere, including the good ones.
So be wrong about it with the rest of us. Pick a night. Make the bad pot. Assume they liked you.
They did. And nobody noticed your rim, because every one of them was far too busy worrying about their own.
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole
About the author
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole · Draper, Utah
Dan Pearce is an author, artist, and the founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. Before pottery, he spent a decade as one of the most-read bloggers in the world. His blog, Single Dad Laughing, ranked #2 among personal blogs worldwide and drew more than a billion reads before he retired it in 2020. He has published six books, including the memoir The All-Important, Well-Fed, Giant White Man, and built an audience of more than three million followers. He has also worked professionally as an animal artist, illustrator, body painter, and poker player. Not in that order, and yes, all of those are real.
In 2022 he launched Dan Pearce Ceramics, known for one-of-a-kind pieces he has never once duplicated, and every sale went toward building The Clay Hole: 10,000 square feet, more than a million dollars invested, and a community of hundreds of members built from the ground up to put people first. Of everything he has made in twenty-five years of chasing creative work, he considers the community the best of it.