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. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta 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 as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
— Ira Glass, via NPR Fresh Air.
One of the wisest things I’ve ever read about doing creative work.
I find myself somewhere in the middle of this, where I’m absolutely in love with what I create on some days and other days feel like nothing is working. While I don’t think it’s something that’ll ever fully go away (or something that should, you need a bit of self-love/hate to strive to get better), the days where I’m in love are certainly more frequent nowadays than they once were, and getting more frequent as I learn and get better.
I think what I’ll take away most of what Glass says is to do more work. Even though I already do play around and do things just for fun (like that Eye of Horus illustration I made this past weekend), I should do that even more, and in a more organized way like a weekly project or something like that.
