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That reminds me of an idea by Ira Glass (This American Life): when you start learning something (i. e. writing), what improves most is taste. Actual competence
by matt4077 10y ago
That reminds me of an idea by Ira Glass (This American Life): when you start learning something (i. e. writing), what improves most is taste. Actual competence takes longer to develop.
The result is a (possibly ten-year long) period where you can clearly recognize that your work sucks but you don't have the ability (yet) to not suck.
- andyjohnson0 10y agoThat's uncommonly insightful. Thanks for sharing.
- matt4077 10y agoToo much in a hurry now, but you should find the original. It's a beautiful short essay if I remember correctly. Or maybe he did it as a song or a play – I only remember it was good.
- detaro 10y agoI found this quote from an interview: http://writerunderground.com/2011/04/28/ira-glass-on-creativity-or-the-gap-between-our-taste-and-our-work/ http://writerunderground.com/2011/04/28/ira-glass-on-creativ...
- shadeless 10y agoThis is where I first saw it, it's a nice form for sharing with other people: http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners/ http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginner...
- lozf 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY
- VLM 10y agoI can write Perl code in Clojure before I know how not to write Perl code in Clojure. Actually that saying goes back at least to old FORTRAN programmers from the 60s vs C programmers in the 70s and their ability to write recognizable FORTRAN in C (whaddya mean that in C a variable named i isn't implicitly defined as an int by its very name? and so on). Thats the pessimistic view. The optimistic view is writing A in B gives you a chance to learn B by replacing small parts of emulated A with bare metal B. Good luck when you scale up and the major architecture of the problem is different when written in A vs B, that won't be as simple as swapping out things.
- thirdsun 10y agoOne of my favorite quotes / ideas that always hits close to home. He continues this thought with the observation that most people in those situations never get past this point...and give up, while only a few keep pushing despite their perceived mediocrity, which is a key part of this thought in my opinion. Here's the full quote: “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.”
- jtrtoo 10y agoHere's the entire note from Ira Glass on that topic, in a video with him: https://vimeo.com/24715531 https://vimeo.com/24715531