Your great taste is hindering your creative work
But don’t let it stop you. Let it motivate you.
Very few people talk about the gap.
But I think it’s one of the great barriers to us making the work we were meant to make. Ira Glass, the producer of the brilliant PBS radio show This American Life, explains it best.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.
“Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you’ve got to know its normal, and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
“It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good…
