"There’s a celebrated potter named [[Warren MacKenzie]] who lives in [[Minnesota]]. **Now ninety-two years old, he has been at his craft, without interruption, for nearly his entire adult life**. Early on, he and his late wife, also an artist, tried a lot of different things: “You know, when you’re young, you think you can do anything, and we thought, oh, we’ll be potters, we’ll be painters, we’ll be textile designers, we’ll be jewelers, we’ll be a little of this, a little of that. **We were going to be the renaissance people**.” "**It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things**: “Eventually both of us gave up the drawing and painting, gave up the silk-screening, gave up the textile design, and concentrated on ceramic work, because that was where we felt our true interest lay.” [[Warren MacKenzie|MacKenzie]] told me “**a good potter can make forty or fifty pots in a day.” Out of these, “some of them are good and some of them are mediocre and some of them are bad.” Only a few will be worth selling, and of those, even fewer “will continue to engage the senses after daily use.”"** --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[expertise]], [[progressing-slowly]], [[discipline]], [[consistency]], **Source** -- [[20241030 - B - Grit]]