I bought white plates! I’m so excited! I’ve been wanting white plates for the longest time. My old dishes were fine… I frankly got lots of compliments on them… But they made my food look dull. They took the attention away from what I was cooking.
You see, I love to make beautiful meals. I love vibrant colors and cool textures. It’s one of my favorite parts about cooking—making food that looks as good as it tastes. And my old plates, while beautiful, were taking attention away from my work.
I think it’s something that happens to all of us who make things. We spend so much time crafting something beautiful. But then we surround it with distractions that make our work look dull.
Perhaps we record a song, but when we show it to someone we point out all the flaws. We apologize for hitting a wrong note. We mention the mix was a bit off. And consequently our work doesn’t shine through. You just put your recording on a distracting plate.
Or we design a graphic, but we aren’t happy with our work. So we look for a flashy new design technique and apply it to our work. We overlay a massive grunge texture. Or we obscure it by adding more to it. And we just presented our design on a distracting plate.
Or we write a blog post, but we preface it by saying, “I’m no expert, but I think…” You just distracted people from your work. You put it on a distracting plate.
We do this sort of thing because we’re insecure. We’re afraid to let our work shine through. We’re afraid other people won’t like it. So we serve it up on a big ol’ distraction.
What if we had the bravery to work with white plates? What if we let our work shine to its full brilliance?
Love the idea of a distracting plate, so maybe we need to be more assertive with our thoughts and artistic outputs!