Journal

When “Dilettante” Became an Insult

I heard a writer dismissed as a dilettante on the radio recently, and went looking for where the word actually came from. Turns out it wasn’t always an insult.

This week’s Friday Film is about that word, the professionalising movements that turned it into one, and my own long trail of things I’ve tried and left behind.

The Guilt of Unfinished Projects (And Why You Should Question It)

For most of my working life I have run small businesses on my own. That means I have been my own marketing department, my own finance department, and my own research and development department.

Research and development is the part that keeps a business alive. It drives innovation, stops things going stale, keeps creativity moving. And in any R&D department - whether that’s a big tech company or a one-person flower-growing operation in Scotland - the vast majority of what gets started never reaches the end.

That’s not failure. That’s how it works.

The Research and Development Department Nobody Talks About

When I was growing cut flowers and doing wedding floristry, a lot of my time was spent trying things. Buying seeds to see whether they’d grow in my conditions. Testing how long different varieties lasted in the vase. Working out the best way to pack things for posting. Most of those experiments didn’t work out, for one reason or another - too expensive, wrong climate, not what people wanted. So I stopped them.

No guilt. Just information.

Being a solo R&D department means spending a lot of time starting things, only a small fraction of which ever reach the end. That is the creative heart of any business. If you only start things you already know you’ll finish, you’ve cut out most of what keeps work interesting.

Think about any engineer, product designer, or architect you admire. You know they have notebooks full of things that never got built. That’s not a problem - it’s the process. The abandoned ideas are what makes the finished ones better.

Why Makers Feel This Differently

Artists, writers, poets - we generally accept that not everything they begin will be completed. A painter’s studio is full of canvases that were started, reworked, abandoned, painted over. That’s understood as part of how creative people work.

And yet when we’re talking about our own craft projects, the unfinished ones sit in a cupboard quietly generating shame.

Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip that is, among other things, about when to give up on things. His argument is that abandoning something is much better done early - you try, you push, you find out what you need to know, and then you stop. That’s not weakness. That’s good judgement.

So why do we treat our unfinished knitting as evidence of personal failure?

What Consumer Culture Does to Your Projects

One significant reason your cupboard has so many unfinished things in it is not personal to you at all. It’s systemic.

Every business in our current economic model is built to resell you. Not because the people running them are bad, but because the whole structure requires growth. So they can’t just sell you the cup. They have to sell you another cup, then the cup’s companion, then the limited edition version.

The way this happens is by making you doubt the thing you already have. You buy a knitting pattern, you’re excited, you get the yarn. Three weeks later the same designer releases a new pattern. They photograph it beautifully, everyone’s talking about it, the test knitters are posting pictures. And your current project suddenly feels like last season.

I know people in The Studio who have bought several kits from the same maker, one after another, because each time a new one came out they couldn’t resist. But buying the next one before finishing the first almost guarantees none of them get done.

My approach now - and I know this sounds slightly extreme - is that when I buy something from a maker, I unsubscribe from their mailing list until I’ve finished it. I don’t want the images and the pull of the next thing while I’m still working on what I have. It helps.

The Near-the-End Problem

There’s a particular thing that happens when you’re close to finishing something, and it’s worth knowing about because it catches a lot of people.

As you get near the end of a project, something starts nudging you towards the next one. I’m knitting a cardigan at the moment - I’m on the second sleeve, which means I’m almost there. But what I keep thinking about is the project I’m going to start when this one’s done.

For some people this shows up as the second-sock problem. The first sock, you’re engaged: working out the pattern, solving things, staying curious. The second sock, you’ve already solved all of that. The novelty is gone and the interest goes with it.

If this is you, try starting your socks two at a time. Or try what I’m doing now, which is allowing myself to do swatches and samples for the next project while still working on the current one. It gives me somewhere to put that restlessness while still finishing what I started.

When Something Goes Wrong

Nothing kills a project faster than a mistake.

I know this in my bones. Whether it’s sending an email with the wrong link in it or knitting two left sides of a cardigan - something goes wrong, my energy drops immediately, and the brain starts saying helpful things like well no wonder, look how tired you are.

The problem isn’t the mistake. The problem is what we do next.

If, at the moment something goes wrong with a project, you put it in a bag and put it away - it will not be finished. I can say this with complete confidence. The bag becomes a holding place for failure and it will stay there.

My approach now is to sort the problem out before I put it down. If I’ve knitted two left fronts of a cardigan, I frog all of that yarn before I stop, so that when I come back to the project I’m coming back to something unfinished, not something wrong. The dentist I was talking to last week has a quilt in a bag with a slightly wonky check fabric in it. My advice to her was: make your decision about that fabric now, before you put it away. Either replace it and start fresh, or decide you’re keeping it. But don’t put the decision into the bag along with the quilt.

What to Do With the Properly Abandoned Ones

Some projects genuinely are done. Not paused, not resting - finished with, even though they’re not complete.

Those are the ones that need to leave your space. Not because you’re giving up, but because every time you look at them and feel bad, that feeling is doing damage to your creativity. Guilt and shame have no business being anywhere near your making.

The work those projects represented - the experimentation, the trying, the learning - that wasn’t wasted. You got something from it, even if you’re not sure exactly what. But the physical supplies, the yarn or fabric sitting there: those can go somewhere they’ll be used.

Not all to a charity shop (though good yarn is always welcome). There are online groups where people swap and pass things on. But move them out, regularly, so your cupboard is a place you’re glad to open.

The point of making is not to finish everything. It never was. The point is the engagement, the curiosity, the working things out. Not every project earns its completion, and that’s fine.

 

Why Noticing Spring Changes Actually Works

We’re told going for a walk is good for us. And it is. I’ve never come back from one feeling worse than when I set off.

But I’ve been thinking about what’s actually happening, and why it matters to understand it. Because if you know why something works, it’s much easier to make time for it.

The first thing worth knowing is that we’re mammals with a surprisingly sophisticated light detection system, and it isn’t measuring light as an absolute. It’s measuring it against yesterday. The change is what registers.

This is why spring, in the northern hemisphere, is such a potent time. Every day there is more light than the day before, and your brain is tracking all of it. It affects your circadian rhythm, your serotonin and dopamine levels, your mood. Women tend to be more sensitive to this than men. People who aren’t using screens at night more so than those who are. What it produces, when you’re outside in spring, is a kind of expansion. Your brain opening, noticing more, reaching out more. Gardeners will recognise it: suddenly everything feels possible again.

Being outdoors, even on an overcast day, gives you far more of that light than being inside.

But there’s a difference between walking and noticing.

Going out with your headphones in, letting everything pass, is one kind of walk. Going out with some deliberate attention to what’s actually there is something else. What’s in flower? What birds can you hear that weren’t there last month? What’s changed in a familiar street, a view you see every day?

And what seems to help is taking some of it one step further: really looking at a specific thing, taking a photograph, writing something down, telling someone. Not everything, not every time. But occasionally.

This works on the same principle as gratitude journaling. When your brain knows it’s looking for something, it keeps working on it in the background. You prime it. The noticing becomes a habit without you trying.

There’s also something worth saying about names.

In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed words like acorn and bluebell and put in technology words instead. There was a lot of outcry. Most of it was directed at the dictionary, which seemed to miss the point. The dictionary was just reflecting a world where children no longer used those words. Robert Macfarlane wrote about it, and The Lost Words came out of that conversation, illustrated by Jackie Morris.

What he said about it has stayed with me: if you can’t name something, you can’t love it. And if you don’t love it, you won’t save it.

So the third layer, when you’re out there noticing: follow the thread occasionally. Find out what something is actually called. Look up the folk history, the old use. Find out that the snake’s head fritillary is Fritillaria meleagris, that Charles Rennie Mackintosh painted it repeatedly. That kind of knowledge changes how you see a thing.

Going outside in spring does something immediate. The light, the noticing, the naming: each one takes it a little further. From good for you, to connected to something larger than yourself.

How I Protect My Brain From Exhaustion

A few weeks ago I mentioned the term soft fascination in passing, and a lot of people got in touch to say they hadn’t heard it before. So this week’s film is about that: what it actually means, why it matters if you live with fatigue or brain fog, and how I use it deliberately rather than just hoping it happens.

The short version: there are two kinds of attention. Focused attention is tiring. It runs in small loops and requires constant effort to maintain. Soft fascination is the other kind: watching waves, leaves, someone kicking a ball in a piazza, where things move gently and your brain can recover without being switched off entirely.

I have Addison’s disease, and managing my energy means I’ve had to get quite deliberate about this. Left to my own devices I will work straight through until I can’t think, which is not a strategy. So I build the breaks in, roughly every two hours, and I know what works for me.

The thing I find genuinely interesting, and talk about in the film, is that plain handwork seems to do something similar from the inside. The kind of knitting or stitching you can do without watching. There’s something about it that smooths the exhaustion of concentrated attention. I don’t know whether there’s research on this specifically, but I’d be surprised if there isn’t.