The difficult stretch is real. The practice is to feel it fully while knowing it isn't the final word - to be in the story and watching it at the same time.
Read MoreYou know the feeling. Something clicks and the whole thing changes. That feeling isn't decoration. It's information and it functions as a compass.
Read MoreThe idea that makes you recoil, the one that doesn't fit anything you've done before, is often the one most worth sitting with.
Read MoreThe shop built in reaction to someone else's work is always slightly behind it. The shop built from its own honest standard is the only one that can get ahead.
Read MoreTake everything away from the shop, one element at a time, and ask at each step whether what remains is still the shop. Somewhere in that process, you cross from decoration into structure.
Read MoreThe legendary shops have origin stories. Most of those stories are simplified at best. The shop that tries to repeat someone else's method is chasing a fiction.
Read MoreEvery shop owner has a chorus - the external pressures and the internal critic. Neither is the work. Learning to set them aside long enough to do the work well is one of the more important skills available.
Read MoreSelf-awareness in a shop context isn't self-consciousness. It's the ability to notice what's actually happening inside you while the work is happening, and to use that noticing rather than be used by it.
Read More