I am learning some very important life lessons since I started throwing pots. The most obvious to me is patience. Patience is everything in pottery.
First in throwing. If you try to rush a piece and pull to hard your piece will end up lop-sided and uneven. Since “there is no mercy in this dojo“, such a piece ends up back in recycling. At the moment I throw away more than I actually keep.
This sounds a little new-agey but I find if I am not centered and calm, I have difficulty centering pieces and throwing decent pots. If my mind is tumbling some thoughts about the day or something that has happened then making the clay do what I want becomes difficult.
You also need patience in letting the pieces dry completely. You will read about it on forums where pottery repeatedly mention “let it dry completely” sometimes that can take days. If you rush it, you get bad things happening. When you hear about pieces exploding in the kiln it is more often than not because of moisture in the clay.
You need patience when firing as well. The first firing, the bisque isn’t that bad. You can stack tons of pieces together and as long as they are dry the firing will be fine. but when it comes to glazes you need to wait for the heat to do it’s thing. Sometimes longer soaks produce better pieces.
If you look at the really good artists, it’s clear their pieces take days if not weeks to produce. Check out my favorite gallery