At VIDCON, Australia, Ashley Perez gave a talk, and when she talked about the allegory that she read on the Internet that was written by a guy who was told the allegory by a teacher, It's been around.

I liked it.

It resonated with me.

I'm going to call it the allegory of the perfect pot pottery teacher divides for class into two groups for the full semester.

I don't know why she doesn't.

She's she's Why does one group you are tasked with making one pot?

You have to only make one pot, and it has to be the perfect pot and the end of this semester we're gonna entered into a pot competition and the other group, she says.

You are tasked with making as many unique pots as possible.

I don't care how good they are.

While two semester begins and the first group there, they start working on planning and research and design and what is a perfect pie and the other group is already, like 16 minutes in covered head to toe it goop and it all culminates at the end of semester when we find that the group of people who just made lots of pots, actually made better pots than the one pot that everybody worked really hard on forever and was just one pot.

Because, John, it doesn't matter how good you are at something.

Your first pot gonna suck and it doesn't matter how much you suck.

Your 1000 pot is gonna be pretty good.

This is more or less the philosophy I have created under for the last 11 years, and it has worked pretty well.

Make a pot I presented for judgment.

I receive feedback.

I use that feedback to make another pot, which I present and receive feedback.

I used that feedback to make another pot, which I then present, And then people give me feedback on the pot.

And then I use that feedback to make another pot, and I have made a lot of video and information security.

There's a term called brute force hacking.

That's where you just like you hate a system with so many iterations of various passwords that eventually you just find a password that works.

It's not elegant, it's not planned.

It's not careful.

It's just brute force.

I am a brute.

Force creator is the only way I know what to do and you can't do that with a book.

You can't write 100 books and throw away the 1st 99 We'll say that these hundreds of Log Brothers videos I have made were a good writing apprenticeship.

I wrote a lot of creative non fiction, and this book, in a way, is a nonfiction book written by a fictional character.

But nothing prepared me for the process of sitting for half a decade with the same lump of clay, turning it into a pot, hating it, punching it until it was just a lump of clay again, turning it into a pot.

Being like That's disappointing, punching it, then turning it into a pot and then thinking I did it.

Look, my pot.

And then I called the professor in in the form of my agent and my editor, my sensitivity readers and my friends and my family.

And they were like, actually, let's let's punch this thing a few more times, and then I did this some or to the pot, just how this is how you make a plan.

And then at the end, I had what I think and what other people seem to mostly think it's a pretty good pot, very different process that wasn't just like a hard process for me.

It felt wrong.

I even though I had never heard the allegory of the perfect pot, I believed in it.

And I have done things that way for so long that doing that, doing the thing, the very thing that the allegory says you shouldn't do it seemed wrong.

But I felt like I had to because I felt like this was the only way that I was gonna be able to tell the story and talk about the stuff that I wanted to talk about.

I did it and I'm happy.

John, I will see you on Monday because we need to prep for our very weird stage show slash book tour thing that we're doing.

They're very excited about, and then everyone else will see you on Tuesday, the day that my book comes out.