Category: the Daily Quote Podcast

Welcome to the Daily Quote, the podcast designed to kickstart your day in a positive way. I'm Andrew McGivern and this episode is brought to you by the Great News podcast. Because good news should be heard and the link is right here in the show notes.

Today's quote comes from Lupita Nyong'o, Kenyan-Mexican actress, filmmaker, and the first Kenyan actress in history to win an Academy Award. A woman born in Mexico City, raised in Kenya, who worked as a production assistant on film sets before earning her master's degree from the Yale School of Drama and whose very first feature film role earned her an Oscar. A woman who understands, from lived experience, what the right environment, the right teachers, and the right belief can do to raw potential. She once said:
”Clay can be dirt in the wrong hands, but clay can be art in the right hands.”The same material. Completely different outcomes. Everything determined not by what the clay is but by whose hands it's in.
Think about what clay actually is before anyone touches it. It has no form. No function. No identity of its own yet. In the wrong hands, hands that don't know what they're doing, hands that don't care, hands that give up before the work is finished… it stays mud. Shapeless. Unremarkable.

The potential was always there, but it never became anything.In the right hands, patient hands, skilled hands, hands that can see what the clay could become, something entirely different happens. The same raw material that was nothing becomes something that lasts. Something that carries meaning. Something that people will look at and feel something they couldn't articulate before they saw it.

Now here's what makes this quote interesting: Lupita Nyong'o isn't just talking about clay. She's talking about people. While working as a production assistant on The Constant Gardener in Kenya, she met Ralph Fiennes, who told her to become an actor only if it was something she couldn't imagine living without.

Those words were the right hands at exactly the right moment that helped shape a direction. She then earned her master's degree at Yale School of Drama, where she was shaped further by teachers, by the craft, by the discipline of learning to access truth in front of an audience. Weeks before graduating, she was cast in 12 Years a Slave by director Steve McQueen and the performance that followed won her an Academy Award.

The clay was always there. The potential was always there. But the hands it passed through, the people who believed in it, invested in it, challenged it, shaped it, made the difference between dirt and art.

This quote asks two questions simultaneously. The first: whose hands are you currently in? Are the people, environments, and influences around you drawing something remarkable out of you or leaving your potential formless? The second, and this one is harder: whose clay are you currently holding?

Because the hands that shaped Lupita Nyong'o were the right hands for her. Are you the right hands for the people in your life who are still finding their shape?l is always waiting. What changes everything is the hands.That's it for today. I'm Andrew McGivern — I'll see you in the next one with another Daily Quote.