It takes years to become a master. But is the amount of time the crucial element?
As US artist Rick Strini said, ‘You don’t get good by doing anything once.’
Rick has more than sixty years working with glass but for the first 30 years he made the same thing.
Then Rick went to a talk by Lino Tagliapietra, widely regarded as one of the greatest living glassblowers. It changed his life.
Tagliapietra told him, “If you’re a glass blower and you know how to make a goblet, you should be able to make anything.”
At first, that sounds ridiculous. How does making one object prepare you to make thousands of others?
But it was in that moment, Rick Strini realised he hadn’t simply learned to make goblets.
A goblet has three pieces: the foot, the stem and the tip. And it all has to balance.
To achieve this you have to learn how glass behaves, how to balance weight, how heat changes form and how separate pieces become one.
For thirty years, Rick had been practising principles, even though he thought he was practising products.
That single insight transformed thirty years of repetition into endless possibility.
It also made me realise that we often misunderstand experience.
We assume experience accumulates naturally. One year becomes two; two becomes ten and ten becomes forty.
If all we do is repeat yesterday, then we may simply have one year’s experience repeated forty times.
Experience only expands when we recognise what can be transferred into the next situation.
Rick also spoke about mistakes.
Instead of dwelling on broken glass, he asked himself, “Why did that crack?”
Mistakes weren’t evidence of failure, they were opportunities to apply what he’d learned differently next time.
Experience wasn’t accumulating, it was being applied.
Perhaps we’ve been measuring the wrong thing.
Maybe we should stop asking, “How many years of experience do you have?”
And start asking, “How has your experience changed the way you approach what comes next?”
Take a moment to think about your current work. Where are you practising products? And where are you practising principles?
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More Field Notes
This is Field Note #18. Field Notes are observations from my ongoing enquiry into experience. To learn more about how to make the most of your experience, read these posts next:
