Twenty seconds of insane courage.
It is a line from a film about a man who buys a zoo, and it is the most useful thing anybody has ever said to me about being brave. Here is why it is true, and twenty three places to spend twenty seconds in this building.
The line, and where it comes from
There is a scene in a film called We Bought a Zoo where a father is asked by his son how he met the boy’s mother, and the entire answer turns out to be twenty seconds long.
“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”
Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo, 2011.
I have carried that sentence around for years, and I have quoted it at people so often that I suspect a few of them now leave the room when they see it coming. It is not because the line is inspiring. Plenty of lines are inspiring and most of them are useless.
It is because the line is accurate about the cost, and almost nothing anybody says about bravery is.
Courage is not a personality. It is a duration.
Short version. Almost everything you are afraid to do is only frightening for about twenty seconds. The twenty seconds is the whole price, you pay it once, and what it buys can last years. That is the entire letter, and the rest of it is a list of places to spend twenty seconds in this building.
You are not afraid of the thing. You are afraid of the doorway to the thing.
Pull apart anything you have not done in this studio and you will find the frightening part is tiny and sits right at the front. The conversation afterwards is just a conversation. Your pot on a shelf is just a pot on a shelf.
And sometimes it goes badly. Sometimes twenty seconds of insane courage buys you twenty seconds of insane embarrassment and nothing else at all. Look at what that loss actually was. You have survived thousands of worse twenty seconds and cannot name one of them.
···Why the line is true
Nobody has ever been asked to be brave for a week.
Take any single thing you have not done in this studio and pull it apart. Asking somebody to show you how they got that rim. Putting a pot on the show and tell shelf. Sitting at the full table instead of the empty one. In every case the frightening part is tiny, and it sits right at the front.
The conversation afterwards is not scary. It is a conversation. Your pot sitting on a shelf is not scary, it is a pot on a shelf. The chair at the busy table is the same chair as the one at the empty table. All of the fear in every one of those things is concentrated into the few seconds before you move.
You are not afraid of the thing. You are afraid of the doorway to the thing.
Which is why this reframe is worth more than any amount of confidence-building. You are not being asked to become a bolder person. You are being asked to be uncomfortable for less time than it takes to find a parking spot.
Twenty seconds is the whole toll, and you only pay it going in.
Now the unflattering half, because I am not going to sell you a guarantee.
Sometimes twenty seconds of insane courage buys you twenty seconds of insane embarrassment and absolutely nothing else. It happens. I have done it in this building, more than once, in front of people. But look at what the loss actually was. Twenty seconds. You have survived several thousand worse twenty seconds than that and you cannot name a single one of them.
A bad twenty seconds is not a fact about you. It is a Tuesday.
Who this letter is for
This one is for a specific person, and I suspect you already know whether it is you.
You are the one with something to add. You noticed the thing nobody mentioned. You knew the answer to the question that went round the table and it was still in your mouth when somebody else said it. You had an idea for a piece that is better than the one you will end up making. You wanted to tell somebody their pot was stunning and you said nothing, and then you thought about it in the car.
You are the one with something to add, who knew the answer while somebody else said it, who wanted to tell a stranger their pot was stunning and said nothing and thought about it in the car.
You are not shy in the way people mean the word. In your own head you are quick and funny and you have plenty to say. The gap is only ever between the head and the mouth.
Everything you have to offer is currently sitting on the wrong side of twenty seconds.
And that is a much better problem than the one you thought you had, because the wrong side of twenty seconds is a distance, and distances can be crossed on purpose.
Twenty three places to spend twenty seconds
So here is the list. Every one of these takes about twenty seconds. Every one of them is available at your very next class. Not one of them requires you to be any good at pottery.
First, the ones that get you known.
Can I sit here. Said at the busy table rather than the empty one. This is the single highest yield twenty seconds in the building and it is also the one nobody spends.
I do not know a soul in here. Out loud, to anybody, in the first ten minutes. It is not a confession, it is permission, and you will watch somebody else exhale.
Using a name. Say the name on the stand back to the person it belongs to. Twenty seconds of feeling like you are trying too hard, in exchange for being somebody who knows their name.
Want to see what I am attempting. Turning your half-made, visibly-going-wrong pot toward somebody. Shared trouble is the fastest bonding agent this craft has.
How did you do that. Asked of the person whose work makes you feel slightly worse about your own. They have been waiting their whole pottery life for somebody to ask.
Sorry, tell me your name again. Twenty seconds of mild awkwardness that removes a problem you would otherwise carry for a month.
Then the ones that get your work seen, which is a different kind of nerve entirely.
Putting something on the show and tell shelf. Especially the piece you think is not quite good enough. That is the one people talk to you about, and the shelf and the class photos have a page of their own if you want to see what ends up there.
Entering the contest. Whatever is running. Entering badly is still entering, and no piece has ever been publicly ranked last in here because I do not publish that part.
Signing the wall. It takes about twenty seconds and no name has ever been taken down.
Standing in the middle of the class photo. Rather than at the edge, half behind somebody. You will want the edge. Take the middle.
Saying I made this, with nothing attached. No apology, no explanation of what went wrong, no pointing out the crack. Just the sentence, then silence. This one is harder than it looks and it changes how you feel about your own work more than anything else on this list.
Posting the photograph. The one sitting in your phone that you decided was not worth posting.
Then the ones that get your work seen, which are a different kind of nerve: the show and tell shelf, the contest, signing the wall, the middle of the class photo, saying I made this with no apology attached, and posting the photograph you decided was not worth posting.
Then the ones that make you better at this, which is where the twenty seconds actually pays cash.
Reaching for twice the clay. The size you have been circling for a month. Wreck it. You will learn more in that one wrecked attempt than in four safe ones, and the jump up in size has a lesson with the actual numbers in it for afterwards.
Cutting your best pot in half. Straight down the middle with a wire, to look at the wall you have been guessing about. It costs you one pot and it buys you information you cannot get any other way.
Asking an instructor to watch you do the thing you are worst at. Not the thing you are good at. There are four of them in the room and this is literally the job.
Naming what you want to learn. Not any tips. The actual thing. I want to pull a taller wall and mine keep going thin at the top. A specific ask gets you ten times the teaching.
Asking about moving up a Level. Twenty seconds of a conversation you have been putting off, to find out whether the thing standing in your way is actually money or just the asking.
Using the glaze you have been scared of. On something you care about, not on a test tile. Twenty seconds of nerve goes further when you already know what is about to happen, which is what the glaze finder is for.
And then the ones that make the room better, which are the ones I care about most.
Talking to the person standing on their own. You already know what it is like. Twenty seconds, and you get to be the reason somebody comes back.
A specific compliment. That is nice costs nothing and does nothing. How is that rim so even lands, because it proves you were actually looking.
Telling us something is broken. A tool, a bucket, a sentence on this website that is wrong. It feels rude for about twenty seconds. We pay members to find our mistakes, which should tell you how much I want to hear it.
Saying the thing you are worried is too much. The enthusiasm you normally turn down two notches before it leaves your mouth. Let one out at full volume and see who lights up.
Walking back in after a month away. With no explanation offered and none needed. This is the bravest twenty seconds on the whole list and I have enormous respect for everybody who spends it.
Twenty three of them. You need one.
How to actually spend twenty seconds
Knowing all of that changes nothing on its own, so here is the mechanical part. This is the bit I had to learn, and I learned it badly and slowly.
Decide in the car. Pick your one move and name it before you walk in. Choosing a brave thing while standing in the middle of a busy room is not a thing that happens to anybody, ever, including me.
Count down, never up. Counting up leaves room to negotiate. Counting down from five ends in a cliff, and a cliff is what you want.
Move the body first. Stand up, take the step, turn the chair. Your legs are far easier to command than your nerve, and your mouth tends to follow your legs.
Do not rehearse the sentence. A sentence you rehearse gets rehearsed forever. Say the clumsy version. The clumsy version works and is frankly more likable.
Spend it early. In the fifteen minutes before class, or the first ten after. Courage does not improve while you sit on it for three hours, it goes off.
One a night. Not a personality transplant. One twenty second act per class. That is the entire program and it is smaller than anything you have tried before.
One twenty second act per class. That is the whole program.
What it turns into
Decide in the car, count down from five, move your body before your brain gets a vote, and spend it in the first ten minutes of class. One a night.
Here is what actually happens, and it is not what people expect.
You do not become brave. Nobody becomes brave. What happens is that the twenty seconds gets cheaper.
The first one costs you everything you have. The second one costs a lot. By the fourth or fifth you will notice, usually afterwards, that you did the thing before the fear had finished arriving. Not because you grew a new character. Because your nervous system has a receipt now, and it stops pricing the same twenty seconds as if it were unknown.
You will not become brave. Nobody does. The twenty seconds simply gets cheaper, because your nervous system has a receipt now and stops pricing it as unknown.
Courage is not a thing you have. It is a toll you have paid before.
And the compounding is unreasonable. The person who asked one question in week three is the person other members are asking questions of by the spring, and they have no idea that is what happened. They just remember that at some point this stopped being hard.
The last twenty seconds
I want to leave you with the part that took me longest to believe, so I am going to say it plainly rather than dress it up.
Nobody in that room is hoping you stay quiet.
Not one person. The whole fear runs on an audience that does not exist. Everybody in there is busy with their own pot and their own week and their own doubts about whether they belong at that table, and the arrival of somebody with something to say is, without exception, good news for all of them.
You have something to add. I have read enough messages from people in this building to know that the ones with the most to offer are reliably the ones sitting on it.
So pick one thing off that list, decide which one while you are still in the car, and spend the twenty seconds in the first ten minutes of class. That is the whole ask.
Twenty seconds. That is all it has ever cost, and you have twenty seconds.
DanDan Pearce, founder of The Clay HoleDraper, Utah
P.S. The line is from We Bought a Zoo and the character says twenty seconds. People quote it at me as ten about half the time, and honestly ten is plenty for most of the list above. Pick whichever number gets you out of the chair.
P.P.S. That list is not a challenge to complete. If you do one of the twenty three at your next class, the letter worked.
If you want more of this: Everybody in Here Already Knows Each Other is the longer game plan, and You Are Allowed to Be the Weird One is about what to do with the twenty seconds once you have spent it.
And the wall: why nobody’s name has ever come down off it.
Both come out as plain text with nothing hidden behind a tap.