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I really love the way Ira Glass puts it: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creat

I really love the way Ira Glass puts it: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that. And if you are just starting out or if 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. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that. —Ira Glass

adversaryIdiot 4y ago
How are you supposed to enjoy things if you're constantly ridiculing yourself? Does that mean the person who enjoys the things they do suck at what they do?
- danShumway 4y ago
  I've been struggling with this a lot recently, but what I've been trying to do lately is dissect that exact question and sort of question the axioms it's based on: - is it actually impossible for me to critique myself and enjoy the things I've made, or is that a restriction that I've just made up in my mind? - is it actually necessary for me to think something is high quality to enjoy it? Is it OK for me to enjoy something even if the flaws are obvious to me? - is there a process here that's enjoyable independent of the output, regardless of whether or not what I make is good? - is my 'cringe' about the things I make primarily motivated by my internal taste, or about my worry that the things I make won't meet other people's expectations? Is my desire to create things that look good to other people different from my internal pride about my own work, and should I treat them differently? - is there an enjoyable aspect to stretching myself even if that means I fail more often? If I put a game to a higher difficulty, do I have less fun just because I'm being challenged more and die more often? So similarly, if I explore a medium or try a programming task that I'm not great at, should I be getting so discouraged about occasionally "failing" at it? ---- I think that it's not necessarily the case that enjoying something needs to be linked to its overall quality. And especially with creative work, I've been trying recently to get better about releasing things that I think are explicitly bad, and saying, "okay, I stink at this and the end result is terrible, but that doesn't necessarily mean I should feel bad looking at it or showing it to other people." And I'm not sure that getting rid of all the criticism centers of my brain or convincing myself that I'm a genius is necessary to get to that state. I think it's possible (albeit very difficult) for me to look at something I've made and see 100 flaws and still say, "I like the parts of it that aren't flaws, and I think those parts are cool." I'm not sure that it's healthy as an artist to even focus at all on whether or not you're good at something, just focus on getting better regardless of what your current skill level is. "Good" is kind of a wishy-washy term anyway. And I'm not sure it's healthy (at least for the way I work) to couple my enjoyment of the things I do to whether or not I think I'm good at them. But :shrug: I'm not sure. I do think that the original quote is less about "here's how you should think of your work, and is more about "you probably already have a tendency to think about your work this way, so don't feel so isolated about that or get too discouraged." Because it is discouraging and I think a lot of artists and creators struggle with the fact that they can see very clearly where they want to be and where they are, and they're not where they want to be -- and speaking personally, it's not something I had ever really vocalized to myself before originally hearing that quote, and I remember it being very cathartic to realize, "actually yeah, this is why I'm frustrated about everything I'm doing -- because my ability to critique my work is more developed than my ability to make it." It's not really saying that's the ideal, it's just describing a thing that happens to a lot of people. The original quote I heard was in a slightly different context: it was a game dev who brought up the same idea and then cautioned that the way a lot of developers internalize that mental conflict is that they never implement ideas or finish projects, because thinking about the theoretically perfect version of the thing in their head is always easier than looking at the objectively less perfect, sometimes kind of terrible thing they've made. His advice was, if you're in that position, recognize it and try to take steps to get more comfortable with messiness and imperfections, because it can be a huge barrier to ever actually implementing and practicing ideas.
aredox 4y ago
It's so obvious once you put it like that. I wish I had seen those words earlier. I (40 y.o.) will try to start again and not quit this time.
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
  it's referred to as the taste gap
rcme 4y ago
> But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. I find a lot of people who should quit don't. Their taste becomes compromised and they fall in love with their own work. I have high school friends who have dedicated the first 10-20 years of their adult lives to artistic pursuits. Some have succeeded and some have failed. What's interesting, to me, is that it was already clear who was going to make it in high school, but some people just didn't know when to quit. The common factor among those who failed was that they felt their work was good, i.e. it met their "taste", when a neutral observer could plainly see it wasn't very good.
- quietcomments 4y ago
  A related idea is George lucas's dis-satisfaction with his own work. He spent so long working on it he can see where he fell short of what he wanted to do and how it's held together with duct tape and glue. He has a low opinion of his own movies. When I know the tradeoffs I make to get the project finished, I come to similar feeling. When I'm working just for my own pleasure/hobby, sometimes any old thing will work to make me feel good about it, even when it's not great.
  - failrate 4y ago
    I also have a low opinion of most of his movies and find that in reworking them, he has overworked them. My favorite remains THX-1138. Just bare bones and mostly quiet performances.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    But when you've made something, you see every flaw, every wart, and every little thing that wasn't quite what you were aiming for. Nobody else sees any of that, because nobody else knows what you were aiming for. It's the curse of creating things.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I learned a long time ago that I am the worst judge of my own work, technical and artistic. So much so that if I think something I've done is great, I take that as a red flag. It's a sign that I should put it away for a while and reassess once it's grown cold.
manaskarekar 4y ago
ZenPencils' illustrated version of this quote: https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners/ https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beg...
QuantumGood 4y ago
This parallels a bit stages two and three in the “Four Stages of Competence”: 1. Unconscious incompetence (Ignorance) 2. Conscious incompetence (Knowledge) 3. Conscious competence (Skill) 4. Unconscious competence (Awareness) https://taskcompetency.com/ https://taskcompetency.com/ shares a method to help learners not get stuck at the lower levels, to keep targeting the higher levels.
beznet 4y ago
I love this quote by Ira though I believe the article linked and this quote aren't really discussing the same thing but certainly have overlapping themes.
franciscop 4y ago
It took me 8-10 years of programming and literally hundreds of projects before I started being happy with the end result of what I was doing. Never ashamed though, I look at my early projects like how you'd look at a child's "paintings", with this sort of feeling of innocence and naivety. It's still different, because a child's painting has no higher goal, while I was trying to build something good and just couldn't, but still there's no shame in learning so don't punish the younger you. And I do remember I was always happy doing it, even though I wasn't proud of the result back then, the challenge and the learning felt like my brain was expanding. And talking about taste, as a frontend dev you need two: the usual actual design taste and the code organization taste. Which are more similar than dissimilar in my experience, but still two totally different beasts and I didn't even have a proper design taste and had to learn that as well. Or at least, I had to learn how to put my innate taste into practical rules to follow, things like https://lawsofux.com/ https://lawsofux.com/ were massively useful for that.
- afgrant 4y ago
  I’ve looked at my work from 7-8 years back and realized that it’s actually better. I’m not sure yet what this means.
  - floppydiskette 4y ago
    Perhaps you were more curious and interested. You certainly weren’t more knowledgeable.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Or working with better people, particularly those setting the requirements. The worst code I've written/worked with has always come about because of unclear/unstable requirements.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Does Ira Glass have a follow-up to this about people with good taste and dream projects? What to do when you have a project you don't/can't do twice yet you know your under skilled to produce it?
- danShumway 4y ago
  There was a designer back when I was in college that talked about this, and I don't know if he was summarizing another quote or giving his own, but I remember him describing the problem of dream projects (roughly) this way: ---- Sometimes if you're a creative person, you have a vision in your head about what you want to make. The problem is, you also can see when the things you make aren't quite measuring up to that vision. And so when you make things, you look at them, and they don't match the vision in your head, and you get very discouraged. The danger is that thinking about the things in your head becomes more attractive than building them. The danger is that you never actually try to build the things because building them is miserable and thinking about the theoretically perfect dream in your head becomes more satisfying then engaging with the messiness of actually trying to construct it; particularly if you know that what you construct won't perfectly match that vision. When you know up-front that the thing you want to make is going to be messy when it's in reality, it starts to feel safer to just not have it be in reality, to only think about the theoretical finished product. And if you fall into that trap, you'll spend a lot of time thinking about what you want to build, and no time ever building it. ---- That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is, I personally think there needs to be a mixture of "I'm going to produce something imperfect and I'm OK with that" and "I'm going to produce a lot of imperfect things and get better at this so it's less theoretical." There are problems that can be solved by looking up resources or practicing, but there are also problems and skills where you won't even know what to practice until you start doing the thing and identifying issues that you didn't know existed. In particular I think about stuff like writing; if you have a theoretical idea for a novel but you don't think you're a good writer and you don't know how to publish -- those are not easy problems to solve unless you sit down and write things and try to publish things, and make mistakes and start to understand what specifically you need to practice. Maybe that means taking a shot at the project with the expectation that you're going to fail, and then saying, "well, okay, I've learned X, let's repeat and try it again." Maybe it means tackling different projects and building up to the dream project. But the trap is where actually working on the project or taking steps to close that skill gap becomes harder than doing nothing. Even small steps make long walks. In some ways, the problem can be looking at the distance and saying "I need to figure out how to cross this distance in one leap." Well, no. What are the skill gaps you have, or what general areas are they in? How can you practice that skill? Do you not really know what the skill gaps are? Okay, fine. Build some terrible stuff and after a while you'll learn what your skill gaps are. Then repeat.
catach 4y ago
Important aspect of this model is that sense of taste is not static. Two things: As skill is improved, taste may also improve at the same rate. When your taste gap doesn't close, it can seem like you're not actually improving. Constant frustration that you're not as good as you want to be, despite actual progress. Comparing your work over time is a good way of grounding yourself. Skill is capped by taste level. If you don't see how your work could be improved then you're not aware of how your skill can be improved. Expanding taste is as important as chasing it. The gap is good.
- sixstringtheory 4y ago
  I saw a great visualization of this long ago. It plots two curves of ability, one for execution and the other for evaluation. They both increase with sinusoid curves shifted so that when one plateaus, the other is at an inflection point at highest rate of increase. Technique and critique don’t necessarily advance smoothly at the same rate, leaving a variable gap over time, so sometimes you feel better about your work and sometimes you think it’s trash. The important thing is to keep practicing.

adversaryIdiot 4y ago

How are you supposed to enjoy things if you're constantly ridiculing yourself? Does that mean the person who enjoys the things they do suck at what they do?

danShumway 4y ago
I've been struggling with this a lot recently, but what I've been trying to do lately is dissect that exact question and sort of question the axioms it's based on: - is it actually impossible for me to critique myself and enjoy the things I've made, or is that a restriction that I've just made up in my mind? - is it actually necessary for me to think something is high quality to enjoy it? Is it OK for me to enjoy something even if the flaws are obvious to me? - is there a process here that's enjoyable independent of the output, regardless of whether or not what I make is good? - is my 'cringe' about the things I make primarily motivated by my internal taste, or about my worry that the things I make won't meet other people's expectations? Is my desire to create things that look good to other people different from my internal pride about my own work, and should I treat them differently? - is there an enjoyable aspect to stretching myself even if that means I fail more often? If I put a game to a higher difficulty, do I have less fun just because I'm being challenged more and die more often? So similarly, if I explore a medium or try a programming task that I'm not great at, should I be getting so discouraged about occasionally "failing" at it? ---- I think that it's not necessarily the case that enjoying something needs to be linked to its overall quality. And especially with creative work, I've been trying recently to get better about releasing things that I think are explicitly bad, and saying, "okay, I stink at this and the end result is terrible, but that doesn't necessarily mean I should feel bad looking at it or showing it to other people." And I'm not sure that getting rid of all the criticism centers of my brain or convincing myself that I'm a genius is necessary to get to that state. I think it's possible (albeit very difficult) for me to look at something I've made and see 100 flaws and still say, "I like the parts of it that aren't flaws, and I think those parts are cool." I'm not sure that it's healthy as an artist to even focus at all on whether or not you're good at something, just focus on getting better regardless of what your current skill level is. "Good" is kind of a wishy-washy term anyway. And I'm not sure it's healthy (at least for the way I work) to couple my enjoyment of the things I do to whether or not I think I'm good at them. But :shrug: I'm not sure. I do think that the original quote is less about "here's how you should think of your work, and is more about "you probably already have a tendency to think about your work this way, so don't feel so isolated about that or get too discouraged." Because it is discouraging and I think a lot of artists and creators struggle with the fact that they can see very clearly where they want to be and where they are, and they're not where they want to be -- and speaking personally, it's not something I had ever really vocalized to myself before originally hearing that quote, and I remember it being very cathartic to realize, "actually yeah, this is why I'm frustrated about everything I'm doing -- because my ability to critique my work is more developed than my ability to make it." It's not really saying that's the ideal, it's just describing a thing that happens to a lot of people. The original quote I heard was in a slightly different context: it was a game dev who brought up the same idea and then cautioned that the way a lot of developers internalize that mental conflict is that they never implement ideas or finish projects, because thinking about the theoretically perfect version of the thing in their head is always easier than looking at the objectively less perfect, sometimes kind of terrible thing they've made. His advice was, if you're in that position, recognize it and try to take steps to get more comfortable with messiness and imperfections, because it can be a huge barrier to ever actually implementing and practicing ideas.

aredox 4y ago

It's so obvious once you put it like that. I wish I had seen those words earlier. I (40 y.o.) will try to start again and not quit this time.

TheRealNGenius 4y ago
it's referred to as the taste gap

rcme 4y ago

> But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. I find a lot of people who should quit don't. Their taste becomes compromised and they fall in love with their own work. I have high school friends who have dedicated the first 10-20 years of their adult lives to artistic pursuits. Some have succeeded and some have failed. What's interesting, to me, is that it was already clear who was going to make it in high school, but some people just didn't know when to quit. The common factor among those who failed was that they felt their work was good, i.e. it met their "taste", when a neutral observer could plainly see it wasn't very good.

quietcomments 4y ago
A related idea is George lucas's dis-satisfaction with his own work. He spent so long working on it he can see where he fell short of what he wanted to do and how it's held together with duct tape and glue. He has a low opinion of his own movies. When I know the tradeoffs I make to get the project finished, I come to similar feeling. When I'm working just for my own pleasure/hobby, sometimes any old thing will work to make me feel good about it, even when it's not great.
- failrate 4y ago
  I also have a low opinion of most of his movies and find that in reworking them, he has overworked them. My favorite remains THX-1138. Just bare bones and mostly quiet performances.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  But when you've made something, you see every flaw, every wart, and every little thing that wasn't quite what you were aiming for. Nobody else sees any of that, because nobody else knows what you were aiming for. It's the curse of creating things.
JohnFen 4y ago
I learned a long time ago that I am the worst judge of my own work, technical and artistic. So much so that if I think something I've done is great, I take that as a red flag. It's a sign that I should put it away for a while and reassess once it's grown cold.

manaskarekar 4y ago

ZenPencils' illustrated version of this quote: https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners/ https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beg...

QuantumGood 4y ago

This parallels a bit stages two and three in the “Four Stages of Competence”: 1. Unconscious incompetence (Ignorance) 2. Conscious incompetence (Knowledge) 3. Conscious competence (Skill) 4. Unconscious competence (Awareness) https://taskcompetency.com/ https://taskcompetency.com/ shares a method to help learners not get stuck at the lower levels, to keep targeting the higher levels.

beznet 4y ago

I love this quote by Ira though I believe the article linked and this quote aren't really discussing the same thing but certainly have overlapping themes.

franciscop 4y ago

It took me 8-10 years of programming and literally hundreds of projects before I started being happy with the end result of what I was doing. Never ashamed though, I look at my early projects like how you'd look at a child's "paintings", with this sort of feeling of innocence and naivety. It's still different, because a child's painting has no higher goal, while I was trying to build something good and just couldn't, but still there's no shame in learning so don't punish the younger you. And I do remember I was always happy doing it, even though I wasn't proud of the result back then, the challenge and the learning felt like my brain was expanding. And talking about taste, as a frontend dev you need two: the usual actual design taste and the code organization taste. Which are more similar than dissimilar in my experience, but still two totally different beasts and I didn't even have a proper design taste and had to learn that as well. Or at least, I had to learn how to put my innate taste into practical rules to follow, things like https://lawsofux.com/ https://lawsofux.com/ were massively useful for that.

afgrant 4y ago
I’ve looked at my work from 7-8 years back and realized that it’s actually better. I’m not sure yet what this means.
- floppydiskette 4y ago
  Perhaps you were more curious and interested. You certainly weren’t more knowledgeable.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Or working with better people, particularly those setting the requirements. The worst code I've written/worked with has always come about because of unclear/unstable requirements.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

Does Ira Glass have a follow-up to this about people with good taste and dream projects? What to do when you have a project you don't/can't do twice yet you know your under skilled to produce it?

danShumway 4y ago
There was a designer back when I was in college that talked about this, and I don't know if he was summarizing another quote or giving his own, but I remember him describing the problem of dream projects (roughly) this way: ---- Sometimes if you're a creative person, you have a vision in your head about what you want to make. The problem is, you also can see when the things you make aren't quite measuring up to that vision. And so when you make things, you look at them, and they don't match the vision in your head, and you get very discouraged. The danger is that thinking about the things in your head becomes more attractive than building them. The danger is that you never actually try to build the things because building them is miserable and thinking about the theoretically perfect dream in your head becomes more satisfying then engaging with the messiness of actually trying to construct it; particularly if you know that what you construct won't perfectly match that vision. When you know up-front that the thing you want to make is going to be messy when it's in reality, it starts to feel safer to just not have it be in reality, to only think about the theoretical finished product. And if you fall into that trap, you'll spend a lot of time thinking about what you want to build, and no time ever building it. ---- That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is, I personally think there needs to be a mixture of "I'm going to produce something imperfect and I'm OK with that" and "I'm going to produce a lot of imperfect things and get better at this so it's less theoretical." There are problems that can be solved by looking up resources or practicing, but there are also problems and skills where you won't even know what to practice until you start doing the thing and identifying issues that you didn't know existed. In particular I think about stuff like writing; if you have a theoretical idea for a novel but you don't think you're a good writer and you don't know how to publish -- those are not easy problems to solve unless you sit down and write things and try to publish things, and make mistakes and start to understand what specifically you need to practice. Maybe that means taking a shot at the project with the expectation that you're going to fail, and then saying, "well, okay, I've learned X, let's repeat and try it again." Maybe it means tackling different projects and building up to the dream project. But the trap is where actually working on the project or taking steps to close that skill gap becomes harder than doing nothing. Even small steps make long walks. In some ways, the problem can be looking at the distance and saying "I need to figure out how to cross this distance in one leap." Well, no. What are the skill gaps you have, or what general areas are they in? How can you practice that skill? Do you not really know what the skill gaps are? Okay, fine. Build some terrible stuff and after a while you'll learn what your skill gaps are. Then repeat.

catach 4y ago

Important aspect of this model is that sense of taste is not static. Two things: As skill is improved, taste may also improve at the same rate. When your taste gap doesn't close, it can seem like you're not actually improving. Constant frustration that you're not as good as you want to be, despite actual progress. Comparing your work over time is a good way of grounding yourself. Skill is capped by taste level. If you don't see how your work could be improved then you're not aware of how your skill can be improved. Expanding taste is as important as chasing it. The gap is good.

sixstringtheory 4y ago
I saw a great visualization of this long ago. It plots two curves of ability, one for execution and the other for evaluation. They both increase with sinusoid curves shifted so that when one plateaus, the other is at an inflection point at highest rate of increase. Technique and critique don’t necessarily advance smoothly at the same rate, leaving a variable gap over time, so sometimes you feel better about your work and sometimes you think it’s trash. The important thing is to keep practicing.