E75 Transcript
The last two episodes were about what gets in the way of doing the work. Scale - the goal feels too big so nothing gets started. Standards - the work doesn't feel good enough so nothing gets finished or released. Both of those are internal obstacles. Things happening inside your own thinking.
This week is different. This one is about something external. Something that's been shaping your work quietly, whether you've been paying attention to it or not.
And that thing is…
The people you're consistently around. The work you're regularly exposed to. The conversations you're a part of. The environments you occupy. All of that is setting your baseline right now for what good looks like, what's possible, and what's acceptable. And most makers have never deliberately chosen any of it. They've just ended up in it.
This episode is about choosing it on purpose. And about what happens to your work when you do.
There's a quote that's been attributed to so many different people over the years that I won't pretend to know who said it first. But the idea is worth taking seriously regardless of where it came from.
"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."
And a writer named Matthew Turner put a sharper point on it: "The smartest person in the room is the only one incapable of learning."
Both versions are pointing at the same thing. Comfort and competence in your current environment feel like a good place to be. And in some ways they are. But they're not a good place to stay - not if developing your work is actually the goal. When you're consistently the most skilled or most experienced person in the spaces you occupy, there's no one pulling your thinking forward. No standard higher than the one you've already reached. No perspective that challenges the one you already have. And without that friction, development slows. Sometimes it stops entirely. And you, the maker, just keeps getting more comfortable doing what they already know how to do.
I do want to be careful about something right from the start though. This principle is not about seeking out people who make you feel behind. That's a different experience entirely and it's not the one I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is deliberately seeking out people who have already solved problems you haven't solved yet. Not to measure yourself against them. To learn something specific from them. There's a meaningful difference between those two orientations and I want to come back to that in some detail because I think it's where this principle either works for you or it doesn't.
Let's start with the mechanism. Because I think understanding why this works makes it more useful than just being told it does.
The people you're consistently around are quietly setting your baseline for what's normal. What good work looks like. What a serious creative practice looks like. What level of technical skill is expected. What standards are acceptable. This happens without any deliberate intention on anyone's part. It's just how human beings calibrate. We look at what the people near us are doing and doing well and that becomes our internal reference point.
There is research on this that's worth knowing about. A developmental psychologist named Lev Vygotsky identified what he called the zone of proximal development - the idea that learning happens most efficiently at the edge of your current capability, ideally with exposure to someone more skilled. Not so far beyond where you are that the gap is discouraging. But far enough that you're being stretched rather than confirmed. The environment that produces the most development is consistently one where you're toward the lower end of the skill range in the room, not the upper end.
There's also solid research on what's called peer effects in skill development - the consistent finding that people perform closer to the level of those around them than to their own isolated potential. The standard of the group does real work on the individuals in it. In both directions. People get pulled up by a higher standard around them. And they get pulled down by a lower one - often without noticing it's happening.
That second part is the one I want to spend a moment on. Because it's the part that doesn't get said enough.
When you're consistently in lower-level environments because they're the default, the convenient, the ones that were easy to access - the standard in those environments starts to feel normal. And normal starts to feel acceptable. And acceptable starts to feel like good enough. And that drift happens so gradually that most creative makers don't notice it until they step into a higher-level space and realize with a jolt that their reference point had slipped.
Now let me talk about the difference between seeking out better environments for inspiration versus seeking them out for information. Because I think the distinction matters enormously for how useful this principle actually is in practice.
The conventional version of "surround yourself with people who are better than you" is about inspiration. Be around people whose work excites you. Whose success motivates you. Who make you feel like more is possible. And that's not nothing - that kind of exposure does something real.
But inspiration is passive. You feel it, it lifts you for a while, and then it fades. And if the main thing you're taking away from being around more advanced makers is a feeling - even a good feeling - you're leaving most of the value on the table. This often happens when you’ve been to an extremely good arts fair and came home walking on a cloud. It was so exciting and inspiring and beautiful. And a month later nothing new happened in your studio.
The more useful orientation is information. Be around people who have already solved the specific problems you're working on and find out how they did it. Not in a general way. Specifically. What did they try that didn't work? What do they know now that they wish they'd understood earlier? What would they do differently if they were starting from where you are right now? That is practical intelligence that goes back to the studio with you and changes your next decision in a concrete way. This is why, when I go to the Cottonwood Arts Festival, I make a point to talk to the fiber artists, ask questions about their pieces, their process, and what they face as challenges.
I keep entering art shows for this reason. Not only to show work - though that matters - but to be in proximity to makers whose work I admire or whose work has something in it I want to understand better. And I force myself to talk to them. That is genuinely not always comfortable for me. But I walk in with a specific orientation - I'm here to learn something, not to compare myself to something. What is this maker doing technically that I'm not doing? How are they thinking about this problem? What can I see in the work that raises a question I should be investigating in my own studio?
I'm also a member of several groups where the work being done is, in my honest assessment, better than my own in certain areas. That exposure changes my internal reference point for what's possible. Not in a discouraging way - in a clarifying way. It shows me specifically where the gap is and what closing it might require. That's information. And information is what you take back to the work.
The distinction between those two orientations - learning versus measuring - is the difference between a high-level environment that pulls you forward and one that just makes you feel bad. Same room. Completely different experience depending on the question you walked in asking. And you get to choose the question.
So let's talk about choosing your environment deliberately. Because most makers haven't done that. They've accumulated their environments - the groups they joined, the classes they took, the makers they follow, the spaces they show work in - through convenience and availability rather than through any deliberate consideration of what those environments are doing to their standards and their development.
And here's the thing about leaving your environment to chance. The default is not neutral. It's not a blank slate that leaves your standards where they are. The default environment - in sewing, in patternmaking, in textile work broadly - is actively mediocre in significant ways. And I want to be direct about that because I think it's important.
The amount of genuinely poor advice that circulates freely in the sewing and making world right now is significant. YouTube tutorials that don't work. Techniques passed on by people who've never actually studied the craft at a serious level. Standards of fit and construction that are so low that most people don't even recognize them as low anymore because they've never seen anything better. We have become so accustomed to seeing clothing that doesn't fit, sewn goods that aren't well constructed, and instruction that confidently gives wrong information - that we've stopped questioning it. It has become the norm.
I had to tell a student last week that a particular technique I've seen circulating online - the idea that you can knock off a garment by simply folding it into fourths and tracing that misshapen bundle - is not a technique. It's a shortcut that produces a result that looks like a garment and functions like a garment in approximately the same way a drawing of a chair functions as furniture. That is the hill I will die on. And I mention it not to be dramatic about it but to make the point that when that kind of advice becomes normalized - when it gets tens of thousands of views and nobody in the comments is raising a flag - the environment is actively lowering the standard. And if that's the environment you're primarily in, it's lowering yours too. Without you necessarily realizing it's happening.
This is why deliberately seeking out higher-level environments isn't just about personal ambition. It's about protecting your own standards from a default that is working against them.
And it's also why the people you choose to learn from matter as much as the content they're teaching. Someone who has spent decades seriously studying pattern making and garment construction is operating from a completely different foundation than someone who figured out a workaround and made a video about it. Both might teach you something. But only one of them is going to raise your standard rather than confirm a lower one.
For the makers who are ready to work in a deliberately constructed high-level environment - one with direct critique, honest assessment, and a small group of people who are serious about closing the gap between what they envision and what they execute - the Fabric and Fiber Studio is built exactly on this principle. The environment is part of what makes it work. Not just the instruction. The company. Being around other committed makers doing serious work raises the standard for everyone in the room.
So if you take only one thing away this week, let it be this…
The environment you consistently occupy is not passive. It's active. It's setting your baseline for what's normal, what's possible, and what's acceptable - whether you chose it deliberately or just ended up in it. And the baseline it sets is the standard you're unconsciously aiming for.
Most creative makers have never looked at their environments this way. They think about the work, the techniques, the materials. But the people they're around and the work they're regularly exposed to is doing as much to shape the trajectory of their practice as any of that.
We talked in episode 70 about how belief determines what you think is possible. And the most powerful thing that changes what you believe is possible is seeing it. Not imagining it. Seeing it - in the work of people who are ahead of you, in environments where the standard is higher than your current one, in conversations with makers who have already solved the problems you're working on.
If you don't grow, you can't help anyone else grow. Staying in comfortable environments where you're always the most skilled person serves no one - not you and not the people who will eventually learn from what you've developed.
The exercise for this principle is worth digging into. I’ve put the link to the free download in the show notes. Grab your copy and go through these principles. Your creative work will thank you. The environments you're in are doing more work on your development than you probably realize, so check It out
Remember, who you're around is what you think is normal. And what you think is normal is what you aim for. That's not a motivational idea. It's just how calibration works.
The default environment in most areas of making is not going to raise your standard. It's going to confirm wherever you already are - or quietly pull you lower. Choosing deliberately means actively seeking the rooms where you're not the most skilled person. Where the work around you is better than yours in ways you can see and learn from. Where the conversations raise questions you haven't thought of asking yet.
Find that room. Stay long enough to learn something real. Then find the next one.
Join me next week as we close this series with Principle 10.
