Keep Chiseling | #79

By Armaan Athwal

There’s something unusually honest that I love about this quote. It doesn’t flatter you. It doesn’t say you're already perfect or glowing or divine. It says that you’re a block of stone. Unfinished. Rough. Maybe even a little misshapen. But not without potential.

And potential isn’t passive. It’s not sitting around waiting to be revealed. You have to work at it. You have to scrape, smooth, carve, polish. Sometimes you remove parts you thought were essential. Other times, you find something worth keeping under a layer you were ready to throw away.

That process is harder than it sounds. Because in real life, what’s unnecessary doesn’t come clearly labeled. It might be an identity you built around being the smart one, the reliable one, the underdog. It might be a voice in your head that sounds like a parent, or a culture, or your younger self trying to stay safe. Chipping away at those pieces doesn’t feel clean. It feels risky. You’re never totally sure what you’ll find underneath.

But that’s the deal. There is no clean. There’s just honest effort. You sand something down, you step back, you look again.

Some of the deepest growth that I’ve seen in others didn’t come from adding more knowledge or skills. It came from subtracting. Letting go of bitterness. Dropping the need to prove something. Saying “I don’t know” and meaning it. The most sculpted people I know aren’t shiny because they’re flawless. They’re compelling because they’ve done the work.

And Plotinus says to “never cease sculpting.” And that might seem depressing as there is never an end, but it means there’s always more to uncover. Not because you’re broken, but because you’re alive. You don’t finish the statue. You live inside the process of revealing it.

Not everyone wants to pick up the chisel. It’s easier to decorate the outside of the block than to cut into it. But if you want to see that light inside you, if you even suspect it’s there, you already know what you have to do.

Quote of the Day

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Michelangelo