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This is nice but I like this advice much better: Ira Glass quote: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do cre

This is nice but I like this advice much better: Ira Glass 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. <

Waterluvian 7y ago
I love that perspective. To add to it, from personal experience: it really helps to be totally, wildly, embarrassingly ignorant of your incompetence at the start. It softens that part where your work disappoints you, because you don't know better. Now, I don't know if this is actually good advice or even actionable, advice, but I've seen it and experienced it many times and it very much enabled me to move past awfulness. - My first programs (I thought `super` gave you access to the UI component's hierarchical owner) - My first music videos (wow super cringey teen stuff) - My first 3D animations (oh so you're supposed to use "textures"?) - Why I never got good at guitar (constantly focused on how my whole family had to suffer how awful I was) All formative experiences I may have never dove so deeply into if I was consciously aware of just how far off the mark I was. I can't even look at any of these examples today because I cringe so hard at myself.
- shostack 7y ago
  I wish I still had my music videos and more of the art I made. I found stuff I created when I was a teenager and younger that I'd totally forgotten about. Things I modeled in software, things I sketched, things I built from Lego, things I wrote, music I made, things I crafted from wood and leather by hand. I almost got teary eyed thinking about how amazing adult me considered the work of child me and all of the free time and creative energy that came with it. I'd do anything to be able to get that kind of creativity back. But I suspect it was a function of both youth and not having a job that draws upon my mental resources so heavily.
- yurishimo 7y ago
  Your guitar story reminded me of my one of my own. My uncle gave me an old crappy guitar for Christmas while they were driving through to visit other relatives. He was a signed musician at the time so he had all sorts of extra instruments laying around that companies would send him just because. Later that next year for my birthday (today actually, but a few years ago!), my family gave me one of those "Learn Guitar" books with an included DVD. At this point I had been playing for about 8 months and they actually said they had bought it way back in March or April because I was so bad they wanted me to get better for their own sanity. However, they said they almost felt bad giving it to me then because it didn't seem like I needed it anymore. I had progressed far enough that it didn't sound like terrible screeching anymore and was mostly passable music. Simple chords and basic strumming patterns sure, but music nonetheless. :) So if you've still got your guitar, I urge you to pull it out and give it another shot. Find some songs you like that are simple and just keep at it. Making music should always be about expressing yourself first and pleasing others second. Good luck :)
  - SenHeng 7y ago
    Happy birthday!
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    I've got young kids and I am the captain now. I am guitaring again. They love it and can't possibly judge my horrible rendition of Wheels on the Bus.
  - sh87 7y ago
    Happy Birthday ! I had a guitar that my (not a musician) uncle gifted me too. Never stuck with it long enough. Last year (after we moved to another country) I was gifted a Ukelele. My family still recognizes my longing wish for learing to make music this I guess. Thanks for sharing.
- MaulingMonkey 7y ago
  An alternative to ignorance is to be enthralled by the process. I knew many of my programs weren't great or amazing growing up, but I was too into the puzzle of how programs and programming works to care. The result was, frankly, secondary to the process. I'm not an amazing piano player, but with a MIDI keyboard and headphones I can gameify it, enjoy the process of practice and learning, measure progress even when it's sometimes hard to see, and do this all even if I'm still skittish about actually performing any of it for others. With something like art - I have trouble seeing my progress, gamifying it, I have a certain vicious judgement of my own work beyond what I judge the art of others by, and I'm not particularly into the process for it's own sake. I haven't made any progress there since high school!
SenHeng 7y ago
I've seen this interview pop up several times but I've always lacked the context to properly understand it, because I don't know who Ira Glass is and what he has done. I don't deny that it's good advice, but who is this guy and why should I listen to him?
- seafood 7y ago
  He's the host of an NPR radio program called This American Life.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- markelliot 7y ago
  Ira Glass is the creator and host of a long running radio show called This American Life on National Public Radio. The show runs weekly and tells stories of Americana and other things. I suspect part of what makes the show famous is that it coined not just a particular kind of show, but a particular kind of sound, editing and production, that, I’d say set the standard for modern audio programs. Several of the shows producers (and Ira’s mentees) have gone on to create other famous shows: - Sarah Koenig created Serial, one of the first truly mainstream podcasts (1M listeners in its first week) for telling, in the first season, the story of a murder of Haymen Lee and investigating whether the man convicted, Adnan Syed, was likely innocent. - Alex Blumberg created Planet Money, a short radio show that explores economics and explains it by looking at what’s happening, culturally, around the world. Later, Blumberg founded Gimlet, a podcast company that recently sold to Spotify for $100M, ostensibly to create content with that, now famous, NPR _sound_. Some of the bigger/more famous work from Gimlet is Startup (now also a TV show in the US), Homecoming (now also a show on Amazon Prime Video), Reply All, and Conviction. Anyway, Ira Glass has hosted This American Life since the beginning, and Blumberg recently interviewed him for a show Gimlet produces called Without Fail. If you’re looking to understand his impact in this space, I think that’s a wonderful place to start. *edited to correct where the Homecoming TV show airs.
  - skipwalker 7y ago
momokoko 7y ago
Taste is for curators who masquerade as creators. The actual concept for people who create is that your hand is behind your eye. Edit: To the asshole downvoter. This is actually serious advice that myself and many others have found very important in our lives doing creative work. Censoring it is a total shit thing to do. Especially when you appear to have nothing additional to add.
- Buge 7y ago
  >Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - momokoko 7y ago
    I know the guidelines. But that downvote was incredibly low quality and I chose to make an exception. It's unfortunate that someone needs to censor discussion of someone that actually does creative work for a living and of a comment that was not inflammitory or off topic without anything of value to add on their part. There is even another comment in this thread that continues to discuss "taste". Which is the absolute 100% worst way to think about creative work. Taste is like the bootcamp for creative work. It will get you shallow quick results that will not extend anywhere past the introductory levels. At which point your work will stagnate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- tashi 7y ago
  What does "your hand is behind your eye" mean, and how does that relate to taste? I don't understand what advice you're giving. (FYI, your comment could have come across as implying that Ira Glass is a fraud who's just a "curator" pretending to be a "creator," so that could be why someone took offense.)
  - michaelt 7y ago
phaus 7y ago
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. On the whole, I agree with his sentiment that hard work will get you success, but the idea he magically started out with some kind of innate talent for telling whether or not things are good is the same type of illogical thinking he's talking about being discouraging to beginners.
- flancian 7y ago
  I agree. It seems that his overall position could be stronger if he just started with the requisite of having some taste. Which everybody has. It'd still all ring true, and be more general, in the sense that one's taste is linked to who one is (your unique background and life experience). So in general this condition of relative uniqueness, saying nothing of it's subjective quality or goodness, could still be enough to make one's creative efforts worth something, inasmuch they'll probably be relatively unique.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 7y ago
  I think you're interpreting 'good taste' too narrowly. A sense of the value of things is what motivates people to want to produce them. So if you value nice things enough to want to make more of them, that's 'good taste'. He's not saying taste is an immutable attribute that cannot be refined. He's not writing an essay on the relationship between taste, skill and creativity and how they feed back into each other. I think he's just saying stick in there. It's tough for everyone in the beginning, and this is one reason why.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  Talent is a real thing, it isn't magic. Each of us has a unique brain with unique programming/experience and some of us are more or less capable at various tasks. When I type stuff like this out I start to wonder why this has to be explained.
- lootsauce 7y ago
  Entirely agree. In art school our instructors often spoke of developing your eye. By seeing many things, thinking about them in depth and doing exercises you develop the skills needed to appreciate, differently the things you see. It was never about fostering some innate "taste" or aesthetic you had to get out. Talent surely does exist but you have no idea about it as a beginner. Talent functions on a level far beyond what most people think, before that comes passion, much time invested and the fruits of this are what most people mistake as talent.
sverhagen 7y ago
Within the context of people learning to code, I feel that many people in this field don't "distaste" their work until they're shown the next step up they can make. So, not mentoring to know where to start, but mentoring to discover where to go next?
Sukotto 7y ago
Zen pencils has a lovely take on that: https://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners/ https://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginne...
rimliu 7y ago
That was exactly the problem I identified with my photography. I can identify and appreciate the good stuff, but my skills are lagging behind. So frustrating.
sxv 7y ago
This is nice but I don't see how it is relevant to the article: "Here's some advice about mentorship." -- "Here is better unrelated advice!"
sh87 7y ago
> ... the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work ... 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 This volume of work coupled with a closed feedback loop (Do - observe - measure - tweak - Do) allows for achieving astonishing results. Also taking a skill apart, practicing and improving individual skills and then putting it all together is the basis of acquiring and mastering skill. I do not believe a mentor can help with acquiring skill. But a good mentor can quickly identify and guide you to the parts that need attention and practice.

Waterluvian 7y ago

I love that perspective. To add to it, from personal experience: it really helps to be totally, wildly, embarrassingly ignorant of your incompetence at the start. It softens that part where your work disappoints you, because you don't know better. Now, I don't know if this is actually good advice or even actionable, advice, but I've seen it and experienced it many times and it very much enabled me to move past awfulness. - My first programs (I thought `super` gave you access to the UI component's hierarchical owner) - My first music videos (wow super cringey teen stuff) - My first 3D animations (oh so you're supposed to use "textures"?) - Why I never got good at guitar (constantly focused on how my whole family had to suffer how awful I was) All formative experiences I may have never dove so deeply into if I was consciously aware of just how far off the mark I was. I can't even look at any of these examples today because I cringe so hard at myself.

shostack 7y ago
I wish I still had my music videos and more of the art I made. I found stuff I created when I was a teenager and younger that I'd totally forgotten about. Things I modeled in software, things I sketched, things I built from Lego, things I wrote, music I made, things I crafted from wood and leather by hand. I almost got teary eyed thinking about how amazing adult me considered the work of child me and all of the free time and creative energy that came with it. I'd do anything to be able to get that kind of creativity back. But I suspect it was a function of both youth and not having a job that draws upon my mental resources so heavily.
yurishimo 7y ago
Your guitar story reminded me of my one of my own. My uncle gave me an old crappy guitar for Christmas while they were driving through to visit other relatives. He was a signed musician at the time so he had all sorts of extra instruments laying around that companies would send him just because. Later that next year for my birthday (today actually, but a few years ago!), my family gave me one of those "Learn Guitar" books with an included DVD. At this point I had been playing for about 8 months and they actually said they had bought it way back in March or April because I was so bad they wanted me to get better for their own sanity. However, they said they almost felt bad giving it to me then because it didn't seem like I needed it anymore. I had progressed far enough that it didn't sound like terrible screeching anymore and was mostly passable music. Simple chords and basic strumming patterns sure, but music nonetheless. :) So if you've still got your guitar, I urge you to pull it out and give it another shot. Find some songs you like that are simple and just keep at it. Making music should always be about expressing yourself first and pleasing others second. Good luck :)
- SenHeng 7y ago
  Happy birthday!
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I've got young kids and I am the captain now. I am guitaring again. They love it and can't possibly judge my horrible rendition of Wheels on the Bus.
- sh87 7y ago
  Happy Birthday ! I had a guitar that my (not a musician) uncle gifted me too. Never stuck with it long enough. Last year (after we moved to another country) I was gifted a Ukelele. My family still recognizes my longing wish for learing to make music this I guess. Thanks for sharing.
MaulingMonkey 7y ago
An alternative to ignorance is to be enthralled by the process. I knew many of my programs weren't great or amazing growing up, but I was too into the puzzle of how programs and programming works to care. The result was, frankly, secondary to the process. I'm not an amazing piano player, but with a MIDI keyboard and headphones I can gameify it, enjoy the process of practice and learning, measure progress even when it's sometimes hard to see, and do this all even if I'm still skittish about actually performing any of it for others. With something like art - I have trouble seeing my progress, gamifying it, I have a certain vicious judgement of my own work beyond what I judge the art of others by, and I'm not particularly into the process for it's own sake. I haven't made any progress there since high school!

SenHeng 7y ago

I've seen this interview pop up several times but I've always lacked the context to properly understand it, because I don't know who Ira Glass is and what he has done. I don't deny that it's good advice, but who is this guy and why should I listen to him?

seafood 7y ago
He's the host of an NPR radio program called This American Life.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
markelliot 7y ago
Ira Glass is the creator and host of a long running radio show called This American Life on National Public Radio. The show runs weekly and tells stories of Americana and other things. I suspect part of what makes the show famous is that it coined not just a particular kind of show, but a particular kind of sound, editing and production, that, I’d say set the standard for modern audio programs. Several of the shows producers (and Ira’s mentees) have gone on to create other famous shows: - Sarah Koenig created Serial, one of the first truly mainstream podcasts (1M listeners in its first week) for telling, in the first season, the story of a murder of Haymen Lee and investigating whether the man convicted, Adnan Syed, was likely innocent. - Alex Blumberg created Planet Money, a short radio show that explores economics and explains it by looking at what’s happening, culturally, around the world. Later, Blumberg founded Gimlet, a podcast company that recently sold to Spotify for $100M, ostensibly to create content with that, now famous, NPR _sound_. Some of the bigger/more famous work from Gimlet is Startup (now also a TV show in the US), Homecoming (now also a show on Amazon Prime Video), Reply All, and Conviction. Anyway, Ira Glass has hosted This American Life since the beginning, and Blumberg recently interviewed him for a show Gimlet produces called Without Fail. If you’re looking to understand his impact in this space, I think that’s a wonderful place to start. *edited to correct where the Homecoming TV show airs.
- skipwalker 7y ago

momokoko 7y ago

Taste is for curators who masquerade as creators. The actual concept for people who create is that your hand is behind your eye. Edit: To the asshole downvoter. This is actually serious advice that myself and many others have found very important in our lives doing creative work. Censoring it is a total shit thing to do. Especially when you appear to have nothing additional to add.

Buge 7y ago
>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- momokoko 7y ago
  I know the guidelines. But that downvote was incredibly low quality and I chose to make an exception. It's unfortunate that someone needs to censor discussion of someone that actually does creative work for a living and of a comment that was not inflammitory or off topic without anything of value to add on their part. There is even another comment in this thread that continues to discuss "taste". Which is the absolute 100% worst way to think about creative work. Taste is like the bootcamp for creative work. It will get you shallow quick results that will not extend anywhere past the introductory levels. At which point your work will stagnate.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
tashi 7y ago
What does "your hand is behind your eye" mean, and how does that relate to taste? I don't understand what advice you're giving. (FYI, your comment could have come across as implying that Ira Glass is a fraud who's just a "curator" pretending to be a "creator," so that could be why someone took offense.)
- michaelt 7y ago

phaus 7y ago

> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. On the whole, I agree with his sentiment that hard work will get you success, but the idea he magically started out with some kind of innate talent for telling whether or not things are good is the same type of illogical thinking he's talking about being discouraging to beginners.

flancian 7y ago
I agree. It seems that his overall position could be stronger if he just started with the requisite of having some taste. Which everybody has. It'd still all ring true, and be more general, in the sense that one's taste is linked to who one is (your unique background and life experience). So in general this condition of relative uniqueness, saying nothing of it's subjective quality or goodness, could still be enough to make one's creative efforts worth something, inasmuch they'll probably be relatively unique.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
simonh 7y ago
I think you're interpreting 'good taste' too narrowly. A sense of the value of things is what motivates people to want to produce them. So if you value nice things enough to want to make more of them, that's 'good taste'. He's not saying taste is an immutable attribute that cannot be refined. He's not writing an essay on the relationship between taste, skill and creativity and how they feed back into each other. I think he's just saying stick in there. It's tough for everyone in the beginning, and this is one reason why.
gameswithgo 7y ago
Talent is a real thing, it isn't magic. Each of us has a unique brain with unique programming/experience and some of us are more or less capable at various tasks. When I type stuff like this out I start to wonder why this has to be explained.
lootsauce 7y ago
Entirely agree. In art school our instructors often spoke of developing your eye. By seeing many things, thinking about them in depth and doing exercises you develop the skills needed to appreciate, differently the things you see. It was never about fostering some innate "taste" or aesthetic you had to get out. Talent surely does exist but you have no idea about it as a beginner. Talent functions on a level far beyond what most people think, before that comes passion, much time invested and the fruits of this are what most people mistake as talent.

sverhagen 7y ago

Within the context of people learning to code, I feel that many people in this field don't "distaste" their work until they're shown the next step up they can make. So, not mentoring to know where to start, but mentoring to discover where to go next?

Sukotto 7y ago

Zen pencils has a lovely take on that: https://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners/ https://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginne...

rimliu 7y ago

That was exactly the problem I identified with my photography. I can identify and appreciate the good stuff, but my skills are lagging behind. So frustrating.

sxv 7y ago

This is nice but I don't see how it is relevant to the article: "Here's some advice about mentorship." -- "Here is better unrelated advice!"

sh87 7y ago

> ... the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work ... 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 This volume of work coupled with a closed feedback loop (Do - observe - measure - tweak - Do) allows for achieving astonishing results. Also taking a skill apart, practicing and improving individual skills and then putting it all together is the basis of acquiring and mastering skill. I do not believe a mentor can help with acquiring skill. But a good mentor can quickly identify and guide you to the parts that need attention and practice.