E66 Transcript
Here's a question I want you to sit with for just a second before we get into today's episode. When you think about success in your work - real success, the kind that shows up in a body of work that actually reflects what you're capable of - where do you put it? Is it something that's coming? Something you're working toward? Something that will be visible once you've put in enough time and developed enough skill?
Because if that's how you're thinking about it, while not completely untrue, I want to offer you a different frame today. And it's one that I think is going to be a little uncomfortable, in the way that honest things sometimes are.
Success isn't an outcome you're moving toward. It's a pattern of decisions you're either making right now or you're not. Small ones. Daily ones. They’re also the kind that don't feel significant in the moment but that determine, completely, where you and your work ends up.
Today we're going to talk about what those decisions actually look like for a working fabric and fiber creative. Why capable people avoid making them. What the research tells us about how decisions accumulate into real progress. And what it means to decide deliberately versus drift by default.
This one is worth your full attention. Let's talk about why success is a decision.
There’s a phrase I heard a few years back from a speaker named Elliott Connie. He was talking about it in a completely different context - nothing to do with making, nothing to do with textiles or fiber or craft. But the phrase stopped me. I wrote it down and I kept coming back to it. The phrase was this: ‘Success is a Decision.’
And I want to be honest with you - my first reaction was skepticism. Because that sounds like the kind of thing someone puts on a motivational poster. It sounds like a shortcut dressed up as wisdom. And I have very little patience for that kind of thing, as you probably already know if you've been listening for any length of time.
But I kept turning it over. And the more I sat with it, the more I thought - no, there is actually something real here. Something that applies directly to the work. Not as a motivational idea, but as a practical one. A structural one. One that explains something I have watched play out over thirty years in the garment industry, 50 or so years as a maker, and that I continue to see in the makers I work with now.
So that’s what this episode is about. Not success as an outcome. Not success as a destination you eventually arrive at. But success as something you’re either doing or not doing, right now, today, in the way you approach the work.
And I think by the time we get to the end of this, you’re going to recognize something about yourself. That’s not a promise of a comfortable recognition. But it will be an honest one.
Let's start with the way most makers think about success, because I think it's worth defining clearly before we dismantle it.
Most of us, if we're being honest, think of success as something that accumulates over time and then arrives. You put in enough hours, develop enough skill, complete enough pieces, and at some point success becomes visible. It becomes real. The work is good enough. The body of work is substantial enough. Other people recognize it. You recognize it. And then you are, by some measure, successful.
The problem with that framing is that it puts success permanently out in front of you. Always slightly out of reach. Always dependent on the next level of skill, the next completed project, the next external confirmation. And if success is always ahead of you, then by definition you are always behind it. You’re always in the position of ‘not yet.’
I want to offer a different framing. Not success as outcome, but success as a pattern of decisions. Small ones. Daily ones. Often uncomfortable ones. The kind that don't feel significant in the moment but that accumulate into something real over time.
And here is where I want to be specific about what I mean by decisions, because I’m not talking about the big ones. I’m not talking about whether you invest in a new piece of equipment, or whether you commit to a particular direction in your work, or whether you apply to a residency or submit work to a show. Those decisions matter – make NO Mistake! But they’re not the ones that actually determine where you end up. Can they influence a fork in the road? Yes. Can they open a door of opportunity? Absolutely! But they rarely, if ever, determine where you end up.
The decisions that build a body of work are much smaller than that. They’re the decision to show up to the studio when you don't feel like it. The decision to practice the technique even though you’re not good at it yet. The decision to cut into good fabric before you feel completely ready. The decision to call a piece finished instead of endlessly adjusting it. The decision to start the next piece before the last one has been praised or validated or fully understood.
And yes - the decision to buy the new equipment matters. But the decision to show up and use it every day is the one that determines whether the investment meant anything.
Those are the decisions I'm talking about. The small, repeated, often unglamorous ones. And there is actually research that supports why these small decisions matter so much - and also why we tend to avoid making them. The research on decision fatigue suggests that our capacity for deliberate, intentional decision-making is not unlimited. When we repeatedly defer small decisions - when we leave things unresolved, when we keep circling back to the same question without answering it - we are not conserving energy. We are spending it. Every deferred decision costs something. And the more we defer, the harder subsequent decisions become.
So, the maker who cannot decide what project to start next, who cannot decide whether a piece is finished, who cannot decide whether to practice or research or just begin - that maker is not being careful. They’re not being thorough. They’re draining the very capacity they need to move forward.
And here is the thing I want you to sit with for a moment. Indecision is not the absence of a decision. Indecision is a decision. It’s a decision to stay right where you are. It’s a decision to delay the decision. To wait. Every day you don't decide to practice, you’ve decided not to. Every day you don't decide to start, you have decided to wait. You don't get to opt out of deciding. You are making choices about your work constantly, whether you are doing it deliberately or by default.
The question is not whether you are deciding. The question is whether your decisions are intentional and move you in the right direction.
Now let's talk about the decisions we avoid. Because this is where it gets uncomfortable, and I think it's the most important part of this conversation.
Capable makers stall. I have seen it over and over again. I’ve done it over and over again. People with real skill, genuine ability, a clear sense of what they want to make - and they are not making it. Or they are making it very slowly, very tentatively, always with one foot still in the doorway. And the reason is almost never lack of talent. It is almost never lack of resources or time. What it usually is, is an unwillingness to decide without a guarantee.
There is research in psychology on something called ambiguity tolerance. Ambiguity tolerance - the degree to which a person can function effectively in uncertain conditions. And usually, what separates people who move forward in their work from people who stall is not intelligence or skill. It is the ability to act without certainty. To make a decision even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. Especially when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. To commit to a direction before you know if it is the right one. Yeah.
And I want to be clear – I’m not talking about recklessness. This isn’t throwing yourself into work without thinking. It’s something more specific than that. It’s the willingness to be wrong. To make a decision, execute on it, and find out what happens. And then, make the next decision based on what you learned.
You probably recognize this pattern in yourself or in someone you know. The maker who spends months researching fabric properties but won’t commit to a direction for the work. The one who takes every course, accumulates every skill, but won't apply the technique to something real because it might not turn out well. The one who has a piece that has been sitting unfinished for a year because it is, in their own words, not ready to share yet. Not ready. Still working on it. Almost there.
These are not descriptions of carefulness. They are descriptions of avoidance. And the reason avoidance is so persistent is that it’s reasonable sounding. You can always justify waiting. More time, more skill, more certainty about the outcome, still thinking about it - these sound like responsible reasons to pause. They sound like diligence.
But the work doesn't care about your reasons.
I want to say that again because I think it’s one of the most honest things I can tell you. The work does not care about your reasons for not doing it. It doesn’t award points for intention. It doesn’t factor in how busy you were or how uncertain you felt or how much you were still figuring out. The work either exists or it doesn't. The skill either developed or it didn't. The body of work either accumulated or it didn't.
Waiting for certainty is a reasonable-sounding way to avoid the vulnerability of committing to a direction. And I understand that vulnerability. Committing to a direction means you might be wrong. It means the piece might not work. It means someone might see the gap between what you intended and what you made. Yikes. That is genuinely uncomfortable. I’m not dismissing that.
But the alternative is staying exactly where you are. And at some point, that must become the less desirable option.
So let's talk about what it actually looks like when decisions accumulate into something real. Because this is where the phrase "success is a decision" stops being abstract and starts being something you can actually use.
No maker wakes up one day with a body of work. It doesn't just arrive. It builds. Piece by piece, decision by decision, over time. And that building isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t feel significant while it’s happening. It feels like showing up. It feels like doing the next small thing. It might even feel boring in a way.
I spent thirty years in the garment industry as a designer and director of product development. And I can tell you with complete confidence that the people who built real careers in that industry were not always the most talented people in the room. They were not always the most creative or the most technically gifted. What they were, consistently, was decisive. They sketched the style. They cut the pattern. They adjusted the block. They submitted the design and moved to the next one. They didn’t wait until the conditions were perfect. They decided, executed, learned, and then decided again.
And I have applied this same principle to building everything I do now. When I was learning Premiere Pro - learning video editing, audio work, Photoshop, Illustrator - I was not good at any of it. I was genuinely bad at it. And what I decided was this: fifteen minutes a day. Every day. Show up and be bad at it until I become decent at it, then decent until I’m good, then good until I’m capable. Not a spectacular commitment. Not a major overhaul of my schedule. Fifteen minutes. A decision, made daily, to do one small thing.
And that translates directly to your work as a maker. You want to develop a hand-stitching technique you haven't mastered yet - fifteen minutes a day. You want to understand how a particular fiber behaves in construction - work with it, in small increments, consistently. You want to develop your eye for proportion and design - look deliberately, sketch deliberately, make deliberately. Not in long heroic sessions. In small, repeated, decided-upon increments.
There is a researcher named Karl Weick who wrote about what he called small wins - the idea that breaking progress into small, concrete, completed actions does something specific to your ability to keep going. Each small completion builds evidence that you are capable of moving forward. Each decided-upon action, followed through, creates momentum that makes the next decision slightly easier. It’s not motivational. It’s mechanical. It’s how progress actually works.
Think about it this way. If you decide, today, to do one small deliberate thing toward your work - and you make that same decision tomorrow, and the day after - at the end of thirty days you have taken thirty steps. Thirty real, completed, forward-moving steps. That’s not nothing. That’s a direction. An ACTIVE direction. That’s a body of work beginning to take shape.
And if, on the other hand, you decided today that you couldn't quite decide, that you needed a little more time to figure out the right approach, that you would start properly next week when conditions were better - at the end of thirty days you’re standing in exactly the same place. Not because you lacked ability. Not because the work was too hard. Because you made a decision. You decided, by default, to wait.
You lose excess weight by deciding, every day, not to eat the thing that doesn't serve you. You keep healthy teeth by deciding, several times a day, to do the two-minute unglamorous thing. Long-term results come from long-term small consistent decisions. Not from one dramatic commitment. From the ordinary, boring, repeated decision to do the next small thing.
So here is where I want to land this plane.
The real decision - the one that actually determines where your work goes - is not the big choice you make once. It’s the orientation you bring to the work every day. It’s whether you are deciding deliberately or drifting by default.
Makers who build something real, over time, are not necessarily the most talented or the most inspired or the most resourced. What they share is this: they have decided, not once but repeatedly, that the work matters enough to act on it-even a little bit. Imperfectly. Incompletely. Without a guarantee of the outcome. They have decided that moving forward on uncertain terms is better than standing still on comfortable ones.
And I want to be honest about what that requires. It requires tolerating the discomfort of not knowing how something will turn out. It requires making decisions before you feel completely ready, or motivated, or inspired. It requires being willing to be wrong, and then making the next decision anyway. None of that is easy. But all of it is available to you right now, today, without any additional skill or resource or preparation or time.
You already have what you need to decide. The question is whether you’re going to.
For the makers who are ready to work inside a structure that supports that kind of decision-making - with direct critique, honest assessment, and a small group of people doing the same serious work - the waitlist for the Fabric and Fiber Studio is open. This is not a course. This is not a comfy place to complain and explain. It’s not a place to consume content. It’s a working environment for committed makers who are ready to close the gap between their vision and their execution. If that is where you are, the link is in the show notes.
And whether or not the Studio is the right fit for you right now, I want to leave you with this.
You do not find out whether you are serious about your work by thinking about it. You find out by what you decide to do next. Not eventually. Not when conditions improve. Next. Today, when you finish listening to this, do you go back to waiting - or do you decide to do one small thing? Do you open the sketchbook? Do you cut the fabric? Do you sit down at the machine? Do you spend fifteen minutes with the technique you have been meaning to practice?
That decision, right there, is what success actually looks like. Not the finished piece. Not the completed body of work. The decision to take one step toward it, right now, without waiting for a guarantee.
That is what I want you to take away from this today. Success is not something that happens to you after enough work. It is something you are doing, or not doing, in every small decision you make about your work.
Make the decision. Today.
