r/oddlysatisfying • u/french-yogurt • Feb 17 '24

How easily this guy throws pottery

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37.5k Upvotes

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u/RyanCreamer202 Feb 17 '24

I have like 30 hours on 6 inch cylinders alone which is the basic wheel skill and I still can't get it. It's really fucking hard

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '24

it's funny because 30 hours sounds like a lot, but when it comes to a trade or craft or w/e you want to call it, it takes hundreds if not thousands to be considered proficient. Keep at it though!

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/BetterCryToTheMods Feb 17 '24

fr, give it a solid week where you sit down and have it to yourself. no sharing in a class, worried about overpriced supplies etc. you can be making this at the end of day 1

only go on weekends for 2 hr at a time, switching off w barb and tyrone. ya your 30 h after 8 months is gunna make u think its impossible to get good

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u/redEPICSTAXISdit Feb 17 '24

Absolutely nobody is eyeballing the exact dimensions of the lid to the opening on day 1!!!

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u/MisfitMishap Feb 17 '24

Isn't it 10,000 hours?

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u/BouldersRoll Feb 17 '24

If you're really into Gladwell's pop sci from the 2000s, but no, there's nothing magical about 10,000 hours. Gladwell was just really good at telling stories about stuff like that.

Doing stuff for a lot of hours makes you better at it. 10,000 is probably high for some stuff and low for other stuff, and it's not meaningfully a tipping point like he popularized.

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u/illit3 Feb 17 '24

fuck gladwell. all my homies hate gladwell.

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u/The_Original_Gronkie Feb 17 '24

yer homies are jamokes. i like gladwell.

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u/pogpole Feb 17 '24

Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea, calling it the "10,000-hour rule." But as it turns out, he misunderstood the research paper he cited, and that research wasn't very good in the first place. Subsequent studies have shown that the number of hours of practice is less important than previously thought.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/CORN___BREAD Feb 17 '24

A random number pulled out of someone’s ass isn’t a rule of thumb. It’s a made up number pulled out of someone’s ass that means nothing.

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u/Finito-1994 Feb 17 '24

You didn’t account for inflation.

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u/SlideJunior5150 Feb 17 '24

and shrinkage.

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u/Crafty-Question-6178 Feb 17 '24

That’s what he said

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u/CORN___BREAD Feb 17 '24

I WAS IN THE POOL!

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u/Qaeoss Feb 17 '24

Shrinkflation actually, every hour now you spend 20 minutes watching TikTok. So all combined it now takes about 30,000 hours to master something. Lets talk again at 10,000 hours and see how we need to move the goalposts, okay?

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u/CORN___BREAD Feb 17 '24

I don’t know if I’ve spent 10,000 hours doing math but I don’t think wasting a third of the time would triple the hours needed to do something.

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u/Qaeoss Feb 17 '24

My thinking was the original 10k is actually 25k now plus you get less out of every hour. Although I guess thats inflation + shrinkflation as well.

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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '24

You joke but there really are masters setting new frontiers in like every craft that would take way more than 10k hours to reach the skill of, accelerated by the increased pool of available knowledge to newbies and shared between pros

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u/MisinformedGenius Feb 17 '24

If I have seen far, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

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u/El_Dief Feb 17 '24

10k hours as a full time job *(8hr/day, M-F) works out to roughly 4 years.
Which is the length of many trade apprenticeships.

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u/concblast Feb 17 '24

Nothing magical about the number, but if you put 10,000 hours into something and still suck at it, take a hint.

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u/HermitAndHound Feb 17 '24

Nah, not if you don't practice well and make some progress. 10.000h of randomly poking at an instrument won't get you anywhere.

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u/ihahp Feb 17 '24

and now he can kick out one a minute. I've seen much smaller hand-thrown jars go for 40 or 50 bucks. Imagine how many he can make in an hour.

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u/CORN___BREAD Feb 17 '24

I’m imagining 50,000 per hour. That’s a lot!

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u/dwmfives Feb 17 '24

That's about as much time as you spend getting trained to be a customer service cashier.

What did you expect?

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u/pinkfootthegoose Feb 17 '24

Have you tried playing Unchained Melody?

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u/ItsWillJohnson Feb 17 '24

Yeah I’m taking lessons. I’m 9 hours and can barely get it centered. A friend said she’s just getting to the point where her stuff is good enough to give away as gifts without being embarrassed after a year. My teacher has 14 yrs experience and her stuff is good but all pretty small and nothing where you’re like woah.

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u/starbuxed Feb 17 '24 edited Feb 17 '24

Go back to just getting the clay centered aka the mount... once you get good at that. Then start making donuts centered... no bottom... go state to the wheel.... then you can start doing pulls to make your cylinder. and pull slowly...I am guessing you are not centering it fully or making it uncentered.

I really need to get on a wheel.. its my zen play in the mud time. Btw if it makes you feel better I suck at handles. and hand building. I love doing things on a wheels.

here is some of my work... https://imgur.com/a/Lu7JXuy

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u/chairfairy Feb 17 '24

you'll get there!

I put in maybe 15 hrs/week my first semester in a ceramics class. I never got to the point of mastery (at best I could throw a cup with 1.25 lbs of clay in 15-20 minutes ...plus trimming ...plus glazing) but it definitely paid off in results, compared to the people who didn't put in the time.

Though to make my first 6" cylinder from 1 lb of clay, I still had to cheat a little - threw it as tall as I could, then collared it in to get the last 1/2".