Hands off

Please Don’t Fix Somebody Else’s Pot

Somebody’s bowl is about to go wrong and you can see it from across the room. Here is why I keep my hands and my advice to myself, and why that is so much harder than it sounds.

October 17, 20264 min read

By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah.

Illustration of a woman in a headband reaching over to point at a lumpy slab of clay while a startled member holding a brush looks on, in a busy pottery studio.

Somebody across the room is trimming a bowl, and the foot is about to go through.

You can see it from here. You can see it from the door. The wall is too thin on the left, the tool is too deep, and in about eight seconds there is going to be a hole where a foot used to be.

Your mouth is already open.

Mine too. I want to be clear about that up front, because every word of this is coming from somebody who lives in this exact urge, at full volume, in a building packed with other people’s pots.

A pottery studio is the worst possible place to be good at something.

Think about how this room works. Nothing is private. Every bowl sits on a board in the open, every rim is at eye level, and every mistake is visible from six feet away to anyone who has made that mistake before.

And everyone in here has made that mistake before. That is the whole problem. Knowing a thing makes you itch to say it.

Why the itch? Because being right is a small, cheap pleasure, and the foot is right there.

So you walk over. You are friendly about it. You say, “Oh, you might want to ease up on that tool.”

Here is how it goes from there.

First sentence, they are grateful. Second sentence, they are listening politely. Third sentence, you have found a second problem with the foot. By the fifth, you are holding their trimming tool, and it is not your bowl.

They came here to make a thing. You turned it into an inspection.

They came here to make a thing. You turned it into an inspection.

Here is what the person on the other end hears.

They do not hear a tip. They hear you are doing it wrong, and I have been watching you do it.

Which is not what you meant. You meant the foot. You meant to save them a bowl.

But the bowl was never the thing they were protecting. They were having an evening. And a thin foot costs somebody a bowl, while a tip nobody asked for can cost them the whole evening, and sometimes the next one, because now they are trimming with a pair of eyes on their back.

I need to tell you where this rule actually comes from, because it is not manners.

On our pick-up tables there is a rule that you never move or touch someone else’s piece. If something looks wrong, you find one of us. That rule is in the booklet every new member gets, and I mean it more than most rules I have.

It is the same reason you keep your hands off their bowl. It is theirs. The wobble is theirs, the crack is theirs, and so is whatever they figure out next.

I say all this as the guy with the most to fix. I have a building full of other people’s pots and a lifetime of opinions about them. The urge never leaves. It only gets quieter when you let the bowl fail.

A pot that goes wrong on its own teaches something no advice can, because they are the one holding the pieces. I can tell you the foot is too thin. I cannot make you feel what too thin means. A hole in the bottom of a bowl you spent an hour on can.

That is not a reason to let anyone struggle in silence. There is a difference between helping and fixing. Help is asked for. Fixing is done to somebody.

What do I try to do instead? Something small, and I fail at it regularly.

I ask. “Want a hand, or want me to leave you alone?” It takes four seconds.

Then I wait for the answer, which is the hard part.

If the answer is no, I say okay, I walk back to my own bowl, and I let the foot go through.

That is the hardest thing I do in the building. Harder than payroll.

And if you are the one trimming right now: yes, I saw it. No, I am not saying anything.

You’ve got this. Probably.

Dan Pearce

Founder of The Clay Hole

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Dan Pearce, author, artist, and potter, at work on pottery at The Clay Hole studio in Draper, Utah

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.

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