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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 t

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

teraflop 6y ago
"Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something." -- Jake the Dog
- devin 6y ago
  When I was learning to play the game Go, someone told me that there's some old advice about "losing your first 100 games as quickly as possible". That's stuck with me. Another one is (and I don't even know if it's 100% true, but I don't much care) that a common housefly will change its path if it runs into a window more than twice. I strive to be better than a common house fly.
  - ISL 6y ago
    There is a photography adage that your first ten-thousand photographs are your worst. I'm not sure I agree -- sometimes you get lucky or circumstance is favorable -- but I am certain that my second ten-thousand photographs were better, on average, than my first.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      My iPhone photo’s are vastly better than anything I ever took with my DSLR, but I’m positive it’s mostly for that reason. That said, the incredible digital processing helps a lot.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    I got basically the same advice from my adviser about collecting data for my thesis. "If too many experiments are failing," he said, "just do more of them, and faster."
  - evanmoran 6y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if failing twice is an optimal evolutionary state. Once is not enough to know if it’s worth changing for.
    - _0ffh 6y ago
      Yeah, as a kid this is what always bugged me about Wile E. Coyote.
  - pusiko 6y ago
    If at first you don't succeed, try two more times so that your failure is "statistically significant"
    - jimmySixDOF 6y ago
      or: If at first you don't succeed, Sky Diving is not for you.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        What part constitutes success? Jumping or safely arriving on the ground?
      - pusiko 6y ago
        In that case it's still statistically significant ;)
- grecy 6y ago
  .. and the only thing that matters is you don't give up.
- pcarolan 6y ago
  "The secret to making great barbeque is to make a lot of bad barbeque" ~ Aaron Franklin
  - v64 6y ago
    To be fair, even Aaron Franklin's bad barbeque is some of the best BBQ you'll ever have.
- floatrock 6y ago
  "The master has failed more times than the beginner has even attempted."
  - 3131s 6y ago
    "A beginner practices until they get it right, a master practices until they can't get it wrong."
    - Smaug123 6y ago
      Although there is a sort of dual "… until they can make their errors beautiful" or something. If you're good enough, it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, because you can turn those mistakes into good things just as quickly as you could have constructed the original correctly.
      - 3131s 6y ago
        It does depend on the medium though, for example painting is pretty forgiving while glass blowing is not at all.
    - RaceWon 6y ago
      > "A beginner practices until they get it right, a master practices until they can't get it wrong." You can get to the point where no one can see any mistakes. It appears perfect... But not to you. The only way to get to that point is to never be satisfied with your own performance, it could always have been a bit better, you could see that small error (or more likely--those small errors) that no one else could see. Ayrton Senna talked about trying to drive the perfect lap using this anology: "It is like trying to tie your necktie so that both ends are exactly the same length; experience and practice say that you can do it--but you can't."
- erulabs 6y ago
  Oh Adventure Time - has such a special place in my heart. If it does for you too - I could not more highly recommend Pendleton Ward's latest project The Midnight Gospel. "How did you almost know my name?" "I have approximate knowledge of many things, child..."
  - aetherspawn 6y ago
    "I have approximate knowledge of many things" - is my favorite quote ever, because it accurately describes my job role as a systems integration engineer. So when my role says electrical and I teach people about cooling, hydraulics, human factors and user experience, some people raise questions and I generally debuff with a paraphrase of this line.
- jerzyt 6y ago
  There are so many people who don't mind being stuck at "sucking at something" it's outright scary. I'm currently learning Python, and very frequently I feel that my solution is not elegant, and I hate it. I imagine a lot of people would just go along with it. Maybe not on HN, but in general.
- dgritsko 6y ago
  Whenever someone says they "aren't good at something" I'm fond of reminding them (and myself) that "you don't get better at something by _not doing it_".
gridlockd 6y ago
Worse yet, most people have bad taste and actually can't tell good and bad design work apart, so you're really spending all that effort to please a minority that you're unfortunate enough to be part of. https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
- avmich 6y ago
  True, but here is - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_Testament_Epistle_of_St_Jerome.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_Testa... - an example of old font. Do you think a lot of people would have problems with reading this?
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    > Do you think a lot of people would have problems with reading this? I don't know. Readability and aesthetics are at odds. I believe there used to be a strong aesthetic desire for text to be of uniformly block-like shape. It took centuries for spaces to appear between words and even longer for paragraphs to become as short as they are today.
    - avmich 6y ago
      > Readability and aesthetics are at odds. I'm not sure. If it's a cafe front, I can deal with Comic-like windings. If I'm reading something for a reasonably long time, I start valuing functionality - here it's readability. Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know.
      - v64 6y ago
        > Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know. I feel like comprehension of the underlying language will aid readability. If it were written in English, despite the illegibility, I'd be able to read it easier by having a general sense of what the words are supposed to be from context.
Uhhrrr 6y ago
Also, between two years in and death, it's still very common to fail into the trough of despair when working on a creative project. Brian Eno has had a pretty good creative run, but he didn't make that Oblique Strategies card deck because he never runs out of great ideas.
apengwin 6y ago
Five beats a day for three summers - Kanye West
- sanderjd 6y ago
  I've never seen this quote and it is excellent.
mncharity 6y ago
The quote appears in many variants -- here's one as an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE .
paulcole 6y ago
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste Like saying “How bout them Cowboys” at a club in Dallas. Everybody wants to think they have good taste and everybody wants to be told they have good taste. Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?
- v64 6y ago
  > Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right? Those who actually fight their way through their creative difficulties as the quote suggests, as opposed to those who read the quote and think "yup, no one recognizes my good taste, screw em".
  - khazhoux 6y ago
    Some people have innate creativity that just needs to be tuned through hard work. Many (most) don't have it in them to begin with. We should all be OK with the idea that we're not all geniuses (creative genius, business, mathematical, whatever) waiting to be unlocked. This says it best: https://mashable.com/video/jj-watt-robbie-rudy-snl-sketch/ https://mashable.com/video/jj-watt-robbie-rudy-snl-sketch/
  - paulcole 6y ago
    Except as the quote actually says, it is advice to beginners.
    - v64 6y ago
      Every expert started out as a beginner.
      - paulcole 6y ago
        Yes but the quote is to be told to beginners, none of whom have yet to “actually fight their way through their creative difficulties.”
psychomugs 6y ago
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
- spupy 6y ago
  “Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.” ― Chuck Jones
analog31 6y ago
This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin. Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a decade away, and I had no access to any interesting software other than what I wrote myself or could find in a magazine. I was having a blast, and felt like master of the universe, though my programs by today's standards would be laughable.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you. I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.
  - endymi0n 6y ago
    Parent seems to refer to taste _being in the way_ of learning (not the lack of it) and I definitely get the sentiment. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the stuff I could have learned when I was young: I had a C64 and I could have learned assembly programming, if I just had met anyone with an actual disk of an assembler program and my library had a book about it, nothing of which was the case. But then again, if there had been YouTube already, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been immediately discouraged by some 4-year old whiz kid somewhere in the world doing it better than me. Back then I was the king of computer science because I was comparing myself to the rest of my rural high school. Now where I'm instantly comparing myself to 4 billion people, that can get pretty discouraging pretty quick.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      Or in my case, likely distracted by some random stuff on youtube.
pqdbr 6y ago
I watched Ira’s video probably 9 or 10 years ago. And while I didn’t notice it back then, this message had a huge impact on me and resonated heavily with my world view over the years, serving as a great motivational driver on my most challenging times. The funny thing is, as time went by and I valued this lesson more and more, I couldn’t, for the life of me, find this video again, nor the author of the quote. I remember going on lengthy google sessions trying to find it back, but failed hard every time, to a point I thought I had dreamed of it, or that it was lost for good. And here it is, 10 years later, on HN, and we meet again. Finally! Thanks for posting this.
- icer2312 6y ago
  Reddit's "Tip of my tongue" is great for finding things you remember, but can't name. People manage to figure out exactly what the poster is asking for, no matter how obscure the description. https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
JackFr 6y ago
John Mulaney said the same thing about stand up. Its far, far easier to recognize good work than it is to do it. It may be be years before your ability matches your taste.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wayne_skylar 6y ago
I think the problem I have is that I don't understand how to get good at something that I have good taste in. Of everything that I've been able to learn I've always had some sort of pleasure in the doing. I enjoyed my C++ assignments in college. I've enjoyed learning the basics of woodworking. I love art and would love to learn to paint or draw but I can't figure out how to enjoy the small victories there. It's not about being objectively good but about enjoying an "ah-ha" moment where you feel like you've gotten better. Any advice for me? I'm very open to anything but I just can't seem to enjoy learning a lot of the activities that I value more than anything.
- wpietri 6y ago
  It's just like Glass says: you have to do a lot of work. Be comfortable that everything will suck for a while. Probably a long while. You may not notice day-to-day progress, but if you practice frequently, you'll eventually be able to look back and see that you're doing better. For many, a good way to do that is just to take a class. You commit to showing up with other people and just working on the thing. A good friend joined an MFA program not because she really expected to learn much from the teachers, but because she benefits from the structure that forces her to write, write, write.
- kd5bjo 6y ago
  I’ve found that I need to alternate between two kinds of practice within a session: Pushing my limits with no real expectation of success is where I actually learn things, but is demotivating. I also need an easier task that I’m confident that I can succeed at, where I can just get into a flow state and perform. I’ve never tackled drawing, but if I did, I would probably pick some simple object and sketch it at the end of every practice session. By drawing the same object over and over again, you’ll notice it getting easier and better over time, and you’ll build a ritual around drawing that feels familiar and comfortable.
- companycalls 6y ago
  Hey there, I struggled with the exact same thing as you when it comes to art. I started teaching myself to draw around a year ago. I made my way through the well known books, 'Drawing on the right side of the brain' and the Andrew Loomis books on faces and figures. The main thing that pushed me through, and still motivates me, is that now I know the language and the reasons for the 'wrong' parts in my drawing. Now when I draw a figure I catch myself thinking 'These legs look weird because I didn't pay attention to the calf muscles and now my figure looks completely out of proportion' or 'My initial gesture drawing was rigid and as a result my figure looks static, with none of the weight being balanced'. For me I can see myself get better, but a lot of the 'Ah-ha!' moments actually come from realising where I've gone wrong and what I need to look at next to make sure I can do better next time. As an aside, a huge bonus with this sort of thinking is an renewed interest and appreciation for artists you like, I catch myself looking at the work of guys like Charles Dana Gibson and marvelling at their control over light and shadow, or the expressions they're able to conjure with a few lines. It's an intensely rewarding experience. I'd really recommend grabbing a pencil and just going for it.
quickthrower2 6y ago
Speak for yourself. My Blender donut looks fantastic!
underdeserver 6y ago
I didn't see anyone posting this, which is in my opinion the best essay on PG's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
polytely 6y ago
My best advice about writer's block is: the reason you're having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it's the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from "writing well" to "writing badly," you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don't like to admit it, because we're raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let's just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that's a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn't going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it's no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft. — Dan Harmon
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Oh man, this one is great. I’ll try this sometime and actually write a story.
- kkcorps 6y ago
  This one is absolutely genius.
- jyounker 6y ago
  This one works for dating too. If you are trying to get rejected, it turns out to be incredibly hard to do.
bluntfang 6y ago
>It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap I think this is key to building any skill. Find a way to get more reps in. Find a safety net to allow you to finish quickly and start over. For example, when I learned how to juggle the important thing was to find a way to recover from failure and start over. I started juggling standing up. The balls would fly everywhere and I would spend 10seconds picking them up, bending over, etc. Very annoying. Then I found out that if I use cloths or juggled over my bed or on the ground, I could easily pick them up and start over within seconds. This got me reps. They weren't always quality reps, but I wasn't going for quality, I just wanted to get the skill down.
achillesheels 6y ago
"For the process of fulfillment of art is of higher importance than the transcendence imagined and desired to throttle the world with. Yes, it is healthy and the essence of the sacredness of artistry to the plenitude of society that the artist becomes entranced by his vision of the transcendent, which offers him salvation in the face of material impoverishment while enacting his being.[1] But the vision is often mistaken as the completion of the work instead of understanding it most critically as only its beginning. Perhaps such verisimilitude is impenetrable to the stubborn set, who would be already fatigued at the awareness of the mountain they have yet to climb in sharing to the world what they imagine they see. They do not get excited at the prospects of the sweat they need to be drenched in to arrive at the glistening of perfection they think sparkled in the corner of their mind’s eye and holds them captive until they unearth it from the stream of their consciousness. They misplace their feeling of self satisfaction in feeling the illuminating spark versus the product of anguishing labor. And more so, with collaborative works, they fail to concede that spark of the incomprehensible is not solely their ownership, it is merely a beacon to direct their will towards and that they must acknowledge that the sublime they are reaching towards can be identically perceived by their fellow artists. As such, the collaboration itself can and does bring a greater fulfillment than what can possibly be imagined by the artist on his own. Again, the strong-headed simply have misconstrued perfection as existing sufficiently in their minds. And this is reasonable to understand when taken in terms of understanding the sense of gratification that is involved in creating the work. Having to accept the labor involved is demoralizing. But what other choice does the artist have? He is not rewarded in hiding his gifts to himself, indeed, society punishes him for it. It is expected, however, that the artist finds pleasure in the labor of creating his being. But again, not all artists possess the same courage in reaching beyond them and of confronting uncertainty. For the creative process is similarly heroic in this sense. The artist must have faith in his efforts, or at the least, be so blinded with passion any creative ejaculation creates the pleasure of self-fulfillment. Indeed, this is the Dionysian method, where the artist has no regard for the merit of his work and is simplistically fulfilled with its spawning. And how poetic; by being so unhinged and drunk, the artist is, through the process, rationalizing the incomprehensibly rational with its final appearance as his artwork. He is making Providence coherent to human conscious experience. There is no impedance erected by his subjectivity’s stubbornness. He merely acts as a conduit to a higher realm of truth, by in a certain sense becoming one with a higher power. It is a tantric dance that dissolves the self, which itself has no concern for its quality and therefore no prejudices which block the artist from becoming an artist. Might we say this oracular feat is pure will? Note that the artist in this instance does not make the work for anything other than itself. He has no expectations, no simian entanglement with which he concerns the relation of his creation to others. The work transcends society, and transcends appropriately human experience. This is the entire aim of art." From my essay On the Struggling Artist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M037G3I https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M037G3I [1] Which is the quintessence of idealism contra materialism.
yjhoney 6y ago
My dad doesn't speak / understand english well. He did manual labor for the past 3 decades (pretty much since having me). For the past year (at 55 years old), he has been learning coding from a javascript book that I've been writing every day every though he didn't understand much. He asks questions and commits to doing problems from the book every day. He updates his progress on notion every day, 7 days a week. https://www.notion.so/songz/26617ff591e44d4f9c376950e7449819?v=71416acbdbc947e6a3e4616bb8fec7e4 https://www.notion.so/songz/26617ff591e44d4f9c376950e7449819... Its been a year and he went through a few notebooks of practice problems back to back. He now catches bugs in my book and proofreads my lesson exercises. He can understand my code and give me feedback. His perseverance and dedication to my content is the greatest gift I can ever receive from anyone.
IndexPointer 6y ago
Quantity before quality, essentially.

teraflop 6y ago

"Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something." -- Jake the Dog

devin 6y ago
When I was learning to play the game Go, someone told me that there's some old advice about "losing your first 100 games as quickly as possible". That's stuck with me. Another one is (and I don't even know if it's 100% true, but I don't much care) that a common housefly will change its path if it runs into a window more than twice. I strive to be better than a common house fly.
- ISL 6y ago
  There is a photography adage that your first ten-thousand photographs are your worst. I'm not sure I agree -- sometimes you get lucky or circumstance is favorable -- but I am certain that my second ten-thousand photographs were better, on average, than my first.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    My iPhone photo’s are vastly better than anything I ever took with my DSLR, but I’m positive it’s mostly for that reason. That said, the incredible digital processing helps a lot.
- mirimir 6y ago
  I got basically the same advice from my adviser about collecting data for my thesis. "If too many experiments are failing," he said, "just do more of them, and faster."
- evanmoran 6y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if failing twice is an optimal evolutionary state. Once is not enough to know if it’s worth changing for.
  - _0ffh 6y ago
    Yeah, as a kid this is what always bugged me about Wile E. Coyote.
- pusiko 6y ago
  If at first you don't succeed, try two more times so that your failure is "statistically significant"
  - jimmySixDOF 6y ago
    or: If at first you don't succeed, Sky Diving is not for you.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      What part constitutes success? Jumping or safely arriving on the ground?
    - pusiko 6y ago
      In that case it's still statistically significant ;)
grecy 6y ago
.. and the only thing that matters is you don't give up.
pcarolan 6y ago
"The secret to making great barbeque is to make a lot of bad barbeque" ~ Aaron Franklin
- v64 6y ago
  To be fair, even Aaron Franklin's bad barbeque is some of the best BBQ you'll ever have.
floatrock 6y ago
"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even attempted."
- 3131s 6y ago
  "A beginner practices until they get it right, a master practices until they can't get it wrong."
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    Although there is a sort of dual "… until they can make their errors beautiful" or something. If you're good enough, it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, because you can turn those mistakes into good things just as quickly as you could have constructed the original correctly.
    - 3131s 6y ago
      It does depend on the medium though, for example painting is pretty forgiving while glass blowing is not at all.
  - RaceWon 6y ago
    > "A beginner practices until they get it right, a master practices until they can't get it wrong." You can get to the point where no one can see any mistakes. It appears perfect... But not to you. The only way to get to that point is to never be satisfied with your own performance, it could always have been a bit better, you could see that small error (or more likely--those small errors) that no one else could see. Ayrton Senna talked about trying to drive the perfect lap using this anology: "It is like trying to tie your necktie so that both ends are exactly the same length; experience and practice say that you can do it--but you can't."
erulabs 6y ago
Oh Adventure Time - has such a special place in my heart. If it does for you too - I could not more highly recommend Pendleton Ward's latest project The Midnight Gospel. "How did you almost know my name?" "I have approximate knowledge of many things, child..."
- aetherspawn 6y ago
  "I have approximate knowledge of many things" - is my favorite quote ever, because it accurately describes my job role as a systems integration engineer. So when my role says electrical and I teach people about cooling, hydraulics, human factors and user experience, some people raise questions and I generally debuff with a paraphrase of this line.
jerzyt 6y ago
There are so many people who don't mind being stuck at "sucking at something" it's outright scary. I'm currently learning Python, and very frequently I feel that my solution is not elegant, and I hate it. I imagine a lot of people would just go along with it. Maybe not on HN, but in general.
dgritsko 6y ago
Whenever someone says they "aren't good at something" I'm fond of reminding them (and myself) that "you don't get better at something by _not doing it_".

gridlockd 6y ago

Worse yet, most people have bad taste and actually can't tell good and bad design work apart, so you're really spending all that effort to please a minority that you're unfortunate enough to be part of. https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/

avmich 6y ago
True, but here is - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_Testament_Epistle_of_St_Jerome.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_Testa... - an example of old font. Do you think a lot of people would have problems with reading this?
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > Do you think a lot of people would have problems with reading this? I don't know. Readability and aesthetics are at odds. I believe there used to be a strong aesthetic desire for text to be of uniformly block-like shape. It took centuries for spaces to appear between words and even longer for paragraphs to become as short as they are today.
  - avmich 6y ago
    > Readability and aesthetics are at odds. I'm not sure. If it's a cafe front, I can deal with Comic-like windings. If I'm reading something for a reasonably long time, I start valuing functionality - here it's readability. Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know.
    - v64 6y ago
      > Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know. I feel like comprehension of the underlying language will aid readability. If it were written in English, despite the illegibility, I'd be able to read it easier by having a general sense of what the words are supposed to be from context.

Uhhrrr 6y ago

Also, between two years in and death, it's still very common to fail into the trough of despair when working on a creative project. Brian Eno has had a pretty good creative run, but he didn't make that Oblique Strategies card deck because he never runs out of great ideas.

apengwin 6y ago

Five beats a day for three summers - Kanye West

sanderjd 6y ago
I've never seen this quote and it is excellent.

mncharity 6y ago

The quote appears in many variants -- here's one as an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE .

paulcole 6y ago

> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste Like saying “How bout them Cowboys” at a club in Dallas. Everybody wants to think they have good taste and everybody wants to be told they have good taste. Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

v64 6y ago
> Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right? Those who actually fight their way through their creative difficulties as the quote suggests, as opposed to those who read the quote and think "yup, no one recognizes my good taste, screw em".
- khazhoux 6y ago
  Some people have innate creativity that just needs to be tuned through hard work. Many (most) don't have it in them to begin with. We should all be OK with the idea that we're not all geniuses (creative genius, business, mathematical, whatever) waiting to be unlocked. This says it best: https://mashable.com/video/jj-watt-robbie-rudy-snl-sketch/ https://mashable.com/video/jj-watt-robbie-rudy-snl-sketch/
- paulcole 6y ago
  Except as the quote actually says, it is advice to beginners.
  - v64 6y ago
    Every expert started out as a beginner.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      Yes but the quote is to be told to beginners, none of whom have yet to “actually fight their way through their creative difficulties.”

psychomugs 6y ago

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

spupy 6y ago
“Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.” ― Chuck Jones

analog31 6y ago

This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin. Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a decade away, and I had no access to any interesting software other than what I wrote myself or could find in a magazine. I was having a blast, and felt like master of the universe, though my programs by today's standards would be laughable.

worldsayshi 6y ago
I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you. I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.
- endymi0n 6y ago
  Parent seems to refer to taste _being in the way_ of learning (not the lack of it) and I definitely get the sentiment. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the stuff I could have learned when I was young: I had a C64 and I could have learned assembly programming, if I just had met anyone with an actual disk of an assembler program and my library had a book about it, nothing of which was the case. But then again, if there had been YouTube already, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been immediately discouraged by some 4-year old whiz kid somewhere in the world doing it better than me. Back then I was the king of computer science because I was comparing myself to the rest of my rural high school. Now where I'm instantly comparing myself to 4 billion people, that can get pretty discouraging pretty quick.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    Or in my case, likely distracted by some random stuff on youtube.

pqdbr 6y ago

I watched Ira’s video probably 9 or 10 years ago. And while I didn’t notice it back then, this message had a huge impact on me and resonated heavily with my world view over the years, serving as a great motivational driver on my most challenging times. The funny thing is, as time went by and I valued this lesson more and more, I couldn’t, for the life of me, find this video again, nor the author of the quote. I remember going on lengthy google sessions trying to find it back, but failed hard every time, to a point I thought I had dreamed of it, or that it was lost for good. And here it is, 10 years later, on HN, and we meet again. Finally! Thanks for posting this.

icer2312 6y ago
Reddit's "Tip of my tongue" is great for finding things you remember, but can't name. People manage to figure out exactly what the poster is asking for, no matter how obscure the description. https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

JackFr 6y ago

John Mulaney said the same thing about stand up. Its far, far easier to recognize good work than it is to do it. It may be be years before your ability matches your taste.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wayne_skylar 6y ago

I think the problem I have is that I don't understand how to get good at something that I have good taste in. Of everything that I've been able to learn I've always had some sort of pleasure in the doing. I enjoyed my C++ assignments in college. I've enjoyed learning the basics of woodworking. I love art and would love to learn to paint or draw but I can't figure out how to enjoy the small victories there. It's not about being objectively good but about enjoying an "ah-ha" moment where you feel like you've gotten better. Any advice for me? I'm very open to anything but I just can't seem to enjoy learning a lot of the activities that I value more than anything.

wpietri 6y ago
It's just like Glass says: you have to do a lot of work. Be comfortable that everything will suck for a while. Probably a long while. You may not notice day-to-day progress, but if you practice frequently, you'll eventually be able to look back and see that you're doing better. For many, a good way to do that is just to take a class. You commit to showing up with other people and just working on the thing. A good friend joined an MFA program not because she really expected to learn much from the teachers, but because she benefits from the structure that forces her to write, write, write.
kd5bjo 6y ago
I’ve found that I need to alternate between two kinds of practice within a session: Pushing my limits with no real expectation of success is where I actually learn things, but is demotivating. I also need an easier task that I’m confident that I can succeed at, where I can just get into a flow state and perform. I’ve never tackled drawing, but if I did, I would probably pick some simple object and sketch it at the end of every practice session. By drawing the same object over and over again, you’ll notice it getting easier and better over time, and you’ll build a ritual around drawing that feels familiar and comfortable.
companycalls 6y ago
Hey there, I struggled with the exact same thing as you when it comes to art. I started teaching myself to draw around a year ago. I made my way through the well known books, 'Drawing on the right side of the brain' and the Andrew Loomis books on faces and figures. The main thing that pushed me through, and still motivates me, is that now I know the language and the reasons for the 'wrong' parts in my drawing. Now when I draw a figure I catch myself thinking 'These legs look weird because I didn't pay attention to the calf muscles and now my figure looks completely out of proportion' or 'My initial gesture drawing was rigid and as a result my figure looks static, with none of the weight being balanced'. For me I can see myself get better, but a lot of the 'Ah-ha!' moments actually come from realising where I've gone wrong and what I need to look at next to make sure I can do better next time. As an aside, a huge bonus with this sort of thinking is an renewed interest and appreciation for artists you like, I catch myself looking at the work of guys like Charles Dana Gibson and marvelling at their control over light and shadow, or the expressions they're able to conjure with a few lines. It's an intensely rewarding experience. I'd really recommend grabbing a pencil and just going for it.

quickthrower2 6y ago

Speak for yourself. My Blender donut looks fantastic!

underdeserver 6y ago

I didn't see anyone posting this, which is in my opinion the best essay on PG's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

polytely 6y ago

My best advice about writer's block is: the reason you're having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it's the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from "writing well" to "writing badly," you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don't like to admit it, because we're raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let's just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that's a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn't going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it's no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft. — Dan Harmon

Aeolun 6y ago
Oh man, this one is great. I’ll try this sometime and actually write a story.
kkcorps 6y ago
This one is absolutely genius.
jyounker 6y ago
This one works for dating too. If you are trying to get rejected, it turns out to be incredibly hard to do.

bluntfang 6y ago

>It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap I think this is key to building any skill. Find a way to get more reps in. Find a safety net to allow you to finish quickly and start over. For example, when I learned how to juggle the important thing was to find a way to recover from failure and start over. I started juggling standing up. The balls would fly everywhere and I would spend 10seconds picking them up, bending over, etc. Very annoying. Then I found out that if I use cloths or juggled over my bed or on the ground, I could easily pick them up and start over within seconds. This got me reps. They weren't always quality reps, but I wasn't going for quality, I just wanted to get the skill down.

achillesheels 6y ago

"For the process of fulfillment of art is of higher importance than the transcendence imagined and desired to throttle the world with. Yes, it is healthy and the essence of the sacredness of artistry to the plenitude of society that the artist becomes entranced by his vision of the transcendent, which offers him salvation in the face of material impoverishment while enacting his being.[1] But the vision is often mistaken as the completion of the work instead of understanding it most critically as only its beginning. Perhaps such verisimilitude is impenetrable to the stubborn set, who would be already fatigued at the awareness of the mountain they have yet to climb in sharing to the world what they imagine they see. They do not get excited at the prospects of the sweat they need to be drenched in to arrive at the glistening of perfection they think sparkled in the corner of their mind’s eye and holds them captive until they unearth it from the stream of their consciousness. They misplace their feeling of self satisfaction in feeling the illuminating spark versus the product of anguishing labor. And more so, with collaborative works, they fail to concede that spark of the incomprehensible is not solely their ownership, it is merely a beacon to direct their will towards and that they must acknowledge that the sublime they are reaching towards can be identically perceived by their fellow artists. As such, the collaboration itself can and does bring a greater fulfillment than what can possibly be imagined by the artist on his own. Again, the strong-headed simply have misconstrued perfection as existing sufficiently in their minds. And this is reasonable to understand when taken in terms of understanding the sense of gratification that is involved in creating the work. Having to accept the labor involved is demoralizing. But what other choice does the artist have? He is not rewarded in hiding his gifts to himself, indeed, society punishes him for it. It is expected, however, that the artist finds pleasure in the labor of creating his being. But again, not all artists possess the same courage in reaching beyond them and of confronting uncertainty. For the creative process is similarly heroic in this sense. The artist must have faith in his efforts, or at the least, be so blinded with passion any creative ejaculation creates the pleasure of self-fulfillment. Indeed, this is the Dionysian method, where the artist has no regard for the merit of his work and is simplistically fulfilled with its spawning. And how poetic; by being so unhinged and drunk, the artist is, through the process, rationalizing the incomprehensibly rational with its final appearance as his artwork. He is making Providence coherent to human conscious experience. There is no impedance erected by his subjectivity’s stubbornness. He merely acts as a conduit to a higher realm of truth, by in a certain sense becoming one with a higher power. It is a tantric dance that dissolves the self, which itself has no concern for its quality and therefore no prejudices which block the artist from becoming an artist. Might we say this oracular feat is pure will? Note that the artist in this instance does not make the work for anything other than itself. He has no expectations, no simian entanglement with which he concerns the relation of his creation to others. The work transcends society, and transcends appropriately human experience. This is the entire aim of art." From my essay On the Struggling Artist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M037G3I https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M037G3I [1] Which is the quintessence of idealism contra materialism.

yjhoney 6y ago

My dad doesn't speak / understand english well. He did manual labor for the past 3 decades (pretty much since having me). For the past year (at 55 years old), he has been learning coding from a javascript book that I've been writing every day every though he didn't understand much. He asks questions and commits to doing problems from the book every day. He updates his progress on notion every day, 7 days a week. https://www.notion.so/songz/26617ff591e44d4f9c376950e7449819?v=71416acbdbc947e6a3e4616bb8fec7e4 https://www.notion.so/songz/26617ff591e44d4f9c376950e7449819... Its been a year and he went through a few notebooks of practice problems back to back. He now catches bugs in my book and proofreads my lesson exercises. He can understand my code and give me feedback. His perseverance and dedication to my content is the greatest gift I can ever receive from anyone.

IndexPointer 6y ago

Quantity before quality, essentially.