the habit you haven't noticed yet
Friday, May 15, 2026
Today:
- the slow skill that is building you without your permission, and why you keep missing it.
- a ceramicist who threw away a year of pots, and what happened to his hands afterward.
- Otter.ai, the voice recorder that turns a 40-minute ramble into a clear set of notes.
- one thing to notice about yourself before tonight.
I was on a call with someone last week and halfway through I caught myself finishing their sentences. Not out loud. Just in my head, one beat ahead, already composing my reply while they were still talking. I noticed it, let it go, and actually listened. The rest of the conversation was different. Better. I left it feeling like I had learned something, which almost never happens when I am half-present and planning my next sentence.
Your perception^
What is one thing you have gotten meaningfully better at over the last year that you have never once said out loud or written down?
Not the obvious stuff. Not the new skill you put on a profile somewhere. I mean the quiet thing. The way you handle a certain kind of hard conversation now versus how you handled it eighteen months ago. The speed at which you recover when something goes sideways. The fact that you have stopped checking your phone the second you wake up, most days. The patience you are growing in a relationship that used to make you defensive. Small. Real. Slow.
Here is what I have noticed: we are very good at cataloguing what is still wrong with us. The things we have not fixed, have not started, have not figured out. We keep a running list. But the list of what is quietly getting better, the list that actually shows us who we are becoming, that one stays blank.
A friend of mine kept a "done well" journal for three months, one line a day. She said it felt embarrassing at first. Then it felt true. She told me it changed something about how she showed up, not because she became arrogant, but because she stopped being so unsure all the time.
The habit that is working but you have not noticed is still working. You are just not giving it any credit.
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."
Carl Rogers
Your acceleration^
There is a ceramicist named Warren MacKenzie who studied under Bernard Leach in England in the early 1950s. He came back to Minnesota and spent the next six decades throwing pots. Simple, functional pots. Mugs, bowls, plates. Nothing flashy. He sold them cheap, sometimes for a few dollars each, because he believed useful things should be affordable and that the making was the point, not the selling.
What he became famous for, eventually, was not any single pot. It was his hands. The way they knew things. The way a lump of clay would center itself almost before he touched it properly, because he had thrown somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand pots and his hands had simply stopped needing instructions.
He said in an interview once that for the first several years he threw everything away. Not because it was bad. But because he was not yet the person who could make the thing he was trying to make. He kept throwing anyway. And somewhere in the middle of all that discarding, he became someone who no longer needed to discard. The learning was not in the pots he kept. It was in the ones he threw out. Every single one of them was changing his hands without his permission.
You are probably doing something like this right now. The attempts that feel like failures. The conversations that do not go the way you planned. The weeks where the work felt clumsy and slow. Something is forming. It does not announce itself.
What would it look like if you trusted that more?
Your move^
Try Otter.ai today. Open it on your phone, hit record, and talk through something you have been turning over in your head. A problem, a decision, something you have been meaning to think about properly. Five minutes, ten minutes, no structure required. Otter transcribes it in real time and gives you a summary. The specific outcome: you get a written record of what you actually think, not what you wish you thought. Most people are surprised by what comes out when they just talk. It is a faster way to know your own mind than staring at a blank document.
Your destination^
Spend two minutes tonight, just before you stop for the day, thinking about one specific thing you did better this week than you would have done a year ago. Not a win. A way of being. Calmer under pressure, more honest in a conversation, less reactive to something that used to knock you sideways. Write it down somewhere. One sentence.
What is the one quiet thing you are getting better at right now that you would never think to tell anyone, and what would change if you actually acknowledged it to yourself?
Floyd
P.S. The pots Warren MacKenzie sold for three dollars are now in museum collections. He never changed his prices much. He just kept making them.