I’ve been thinking about modeling clay.
Not because I’m planning to make anything with it, although now that I’ve been thinking about it so much, perhaps I should.
It’s the feeling of working with clay that interests me. You pick up a piece, hold it in your hands, and begin shaping it. You might have an idea of what you’re making, but as you work, things begin to change.
Your fingers discover something your eyes haven’t quite noticed yet. You turn the clay around, look at it from another angle, and suddenly the shape you were working toward doesn’t seem quite right anymore.
So you change it.
And somewhere in that process, you’re not just following an idea you already had. You’re discovering something as you go.
I think that’s how many of my ideas develop.
When an idea is still taking shape
I rarely begin a creative project with everything figured out.
Usually, there’s something that interests me. A question, a thought, or perhaps just a feeling that there’s something worth exploring.
Sometimes I can explain it quite clearly. Other times, I struggle to find the words.
And I don’t always know why an idea interests me in the first place.
But I start working with it anyway.
I talk about it. I write a few notes. I look at it from different directions. Sometimes I put it aside for a while, only to discover that I’ve been thinking about it in the background without really noticing.
Eventually, something starts to take shape.
But here’s the interesting part. What emerges isn’t always what I thought I was working toward.
And I don’t necessarily see that as a problem.
That feeling in your stomach
There’s something about developing an idea that I find difficult to explain, because it isn’t entirely about thinking.
It’s also about feeling.
Have you ever been working on something that makes perfect sense, but you still have this uncomfortable feeling that something isn’t right?
You can’t point to a specific problem. You might even have a perfectly reasonable explanation for every decision you’ve made.
But there’s that little feeling in your stomach.
Something is off.
I’ve experienced this many times with my creative projects. I can have a plan that looks good on paper, yet when I imagine actually following it, I feel strangely disconnected from it.
Other times, a small change suddenly brings a sense of excitement. A sentence captures something I’ve been trying to express. A new direction opens up, and I want to keep exploring.
I don’t always know immediately why one version feels wrong and another feels right.
And perhaps I don’t need to.
That doesn’t mean I should blindly trust every feeling. Sometimes discomfort is simply part of trying something unfamiliar. Sometimes excitement makes an idea seem better than it actually is.
But I don’t want to ignore those feelings either.
They’re part of the experience of creating.
Just as my fingers tell me something about the clay I’m holding, my emotional reactions tell me something about the idea I’m working with.
I still need to decide what to do with that information.
When someone else touches the clay
Recently, I’ve been having conversations about the future direction of my YouTube channel, Creator in the Loop.
I thought I had a fairly clear understanding of what I wanted the channel to be about.
AI, learning, thinking, creativity, and how we as humans relate to all of it.
Those subjects haven’t really changed.
But as I began talking about the direction I wanted to take, I realized that the way I was describing the channel didn’t always feel quite right.
At one point, we were discussing whether I wanted to be seen as a teacher, someone who explains things and helps people find answers.
That description wasn’t entirely wrong. I’ve spent much of my life enjoying teaching and sharing what I’ve learned.
But something about it didn’t fit what I was trying to create now.
Through the conversation, I began recognizing something else.
I’m increasingly interested in exploring questions publicly, sharing what I discover, and inviting other people to think alongside me.
I don’t always want to arrive with an answer.
Sometimes I want to arrive with a question.
The interesting thing is that I hadn’t sat down intending to make that distinction. It emerged as I tried to explain what I was feeling.
And when I finally found words that came closer to what I meant, I could feel the difference.
The clay had changed shape in my hands.
This is also one of the things I appreciate about using AI as a thinking partner. Not because it always understands what I mean, because it certainly doesn’t. Sometimes it takes several attempts before we’re even talking about the same thing.
But those misunderstandings can be useful.
When an AI suggests an interpretation that doesn’t feel right, I have to stop and ask myself why.
What exactly is missing? What am I trying to say that hasn’t come across?
I find myself explaining, correcting, reconsidering, and occasionally discovering something I hadn’t realized was part of my original thought.
Of course, that can happen in conversations with other people too, or even when I’m writing alone.
The important part, at least for me, is remaining involved in what is taking shape.
The ideas we carry with us
Some ideas change quickly. Others seem to stay with us for years.
I’ve noticed that older ideas sometimes return when I’m working on something completely different.
A project I abandoned years ago might suddenly connect with something I’m exploring today. An experience I thought had little importance turns out to have shaped how I approach a new question.
It’s as though pieces of clay from different projects find their way onto the same table.
And sometimes, without deliberately planning it, I begin combining them.
I find this particularly interesting because we often think about ideas as individual things. We have an idea, develop it, finish the project, and move on.
But I’m not sure my creative life works that way.
Ideas overlap. They influence each other. They carry traces of experiences, conversations, and feelings that may have happened long before I began working on the current project.
Even when I think I’m starting something new, I’m probably bringing quite a lot of old clay with me.
Perhaps the clay doesn’t need to harden
One thing I like about modeling clay is that you can keep working with it.
You can leave it on the table, come back later, and discover that you see something different.
You can change a shape you were perfectly happy with yesterday.
And you can decide that what you’ve made is interesting, even if it doesn’t become what you originally imagined.
I wonder whether I could approach more of my ideas that way.
Not every thought needs to become a finished project. Not every question needs an answer immediately. And perhaps even the ideas that do become something tangible can remain open to change.
There’s a practical side to this, of course. Videos have to be finished, articles published, and decisions made. I can’t keep reshaping everything forever.
But finishing a piece of work doesn’t necessarily mean the thinking behind it has ended.
I can return to an idea later with new experiences, different feelings, and perhaps a better understanding of what I was trying to express.
I’m beginning to appreciate that more and more.
Maybe because I have enough years and unfinished projects behind me to recognize how often something I once considered finished eventually became the beginning of something else.
And maybe because I’m learning to pay closer attention to that feeling I get when an idea begins to change in my hands.
I still don’t always have the words for it.
But I recognize the feeling.
And I’m curious to see what shape it takes next.
