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This brought to mind a quote from Ira Glass: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get in
by freetime2 6mo ago
This brought to mind a quote from Ira Glass:
> 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.
I think listening and transcribing is great advice. Careful listening will help to improve your own listening ability and taste. It also helps to demystify why something is great.
But it's also going to be a struggle - especially at first. You have to be prepared to struggle, a LOT. Most people won't be able to keep at it, and that's one of the things that separates the greats from everyone else.
- LiquidSky 6mo agoThat reminds me of an interview I heard with comicbook artist Chip Zdarsky. He was talking about how we all love to draw as kids, but eventually around 10 years old or so we start to become aware that what we see in our heads isn't anywhere near what's appearing on the page in our drawings, and that gap acts as a powerful filter discouraging most people from pursuing art any further.
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- NetOpWibby 6mo agoYou know you're gonna get banned/deleted, right?
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- NetOpWibby 6mo agoI don't know you but your life has value. I hope you find peace.
- drivebyhooting 6mo agoI don’t understand this non-sequitur
- analog31 6mo agoI'm a jazz musician, and my kids are both professional classical players. I've asked them why they don't learn to play jazz. My daughter described pretty much what Glass is saying here. She calls it "fear of sucking." She knows what good jazz improvisation sounds like, and trying to make herself do it is pretty discouraging. Not that there's anything wrong with loving and playing classical music, which is a factor too. This may be why it's different when you start very young. You're not conscious of your own sucking, you just play, usually in a setting where everybody's congratulating you. For sucking. ;-) I started on classical, and got into jazz by accident, as a bassist. It turns out that you can function in a band as a bassist without having to improvise very much, so I was able to learn at my own pace and eventually did. In fact a lot of good jazz players started out in school jazz bands or large ensembles where you didn't have to be a good improviser right up front.
- gritspants 6mo agoI picked up Violin as an adult, have done recitals, and I suck. Being able to suck and find joy in something anyway even if you're not top nth percentile is a valuable life skill.
- taeric 6mo agoSo many things in life are better if you can get past that fear of not being good. Because very very few people can skip the stage where they are not good. (I'd be comfortable saying nobody. But there is always somebody, it seems.)
- grogenaut 6mo agoI tell my Mentees one of the greatest skills is getting good at not being good at something. Being comfortable being uncomfortable.
- ziofill 6mo agoThis is good advice for most human activities. I told my students these exact words (you gotta get comfortable being uncomfortable) countless times when teaching math and physics.
- WalterBright 6mo agoI was at a dance hall the other day, and this young lady came floating in. It's hard to describe how she walked - just like she was effortlessly gliding. It looks easy, but anyone else would look like a moose trying it. It's the result of a lifetime of ballet dancing. Probably 10,000 hours, at least. I was just in awe.
- WalterBright 6mo agoAnother incident: I was stepping out of my ride to the airport, and noticed another woman pulling her luggage out of the trunk of a car. I remarked "I bet you're a ballet dancer." She said "nope, I'm an ice dancer!" Funny I could tell just by the way she wrangled the luggage.
- claysmithr 6mo agoand I'm on my knees looking for the answer
- WalterBright 6mo ago???
- mettamage 6mo agoIt’s a song “Are we human or are we dancer”
- WalterBright 6mo agothank you
- pcdevils 6mo agoKiller reply
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo agoIt's not just the 10,000 hours, it's learning it very young. I am an ex-professional ballet dancer, and one of the things I always find interesting is that any experienced ballet dancer can instantly tell who trained as a child and who didn't solely by how they stand (literally not even moving) at the barre. But the thing is, children with only a few years of training under their belt will often show this good form, while I have literally never seen someone who started as an adult, even dedicated adults who take class 4-5 times a week, get rid of that "I started as an adult" posture. As an example, I was actually quite impressed at how Natalie Portman really managed to "look the part" in her role as a ballerina in Black Swan. Still, she wasn't fooling anyone with training - even with just a simple port de bras (raising of an arm), you could easily tell she wasn't a dancer.
- gxs 6mo agoI've picked up a couple languages relatively easily and I 100% attribute it to the fact that I have no shame - zero I will speak in my ugly, broken, American accent and do it til I improve. I didn't read about this technique in a book or anything, I simply mirrored what I saw kids do and IMO a big reason kids do well with picking up language (aside from all the physiological stuff) is that they actual speak it - they aren't concerned about whether it sounds like baby talk or not A lot of advice feels trite and cliche, like keep trying, etc - but often times it takes repetition and hearing the message in many different ways before it sinks. As a tangent - this is the value i found in therapy too - a great therapist that was patient and consistent in their messaging day in and day out eventually led to some of what they said sinking in.
- hunter-gatherer 6mo agoI also picked up a couple languages as an adult and can attest to this. You have to be willing to talk and know you are butchering the language. Nobody cares either. People are genuinely pleased to hear the effort, especially if you're a guest in their country.
- Ma8ee 6mo agoI guess you never tried to speak French in France.
- abcd_f 6mo agoThis is more of urban legend that may somewhat hold true in tourist-heavy areas.
- darkfloo 6mo agoI’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore. I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.
- TheJoeMan 6mo agoI think another aspect is regarding fundamentals. In order to stay engaged in the early years, you will skip over the minutia. But to achieve the next level, you must go back and drill the fundamentals, unlearning any bad habits in the process. Only then, once you’ve “learned the rules”, can you then surpass/break them.
- jonhohle 6mo agoThis works for programming as well. I’ve spent countless hours reimplementing things or cloning things just to learn how they work. Sometimes mine is better than the original, sometimes it’s not. But regardless, I learn a lot along the way and occasionally get to teach something as well. It’s a great way to learn new languages, new concepts, new systems.
- sameers 6mo agoDo you know the source for this quote? I would love to read more, if there is more.
- hirako2000 6mo agoAre you implying some people don't have taste, or less of it? I like to call it interest. What makes something interesting to some that I'm not sure.
- lesostep 6mo agoTaste absolutely can and does evolve the more you play. It doesn't mean that everyone taste evolves towards one absolute taste, people stay different. I kinda think it applies to all artistic hobbies. On one hand you learn a practical hands-applying skill, on another hand you learn how to express yourself and/or listen to expression of others in chosen medium. And, well, the more you look at something, the more you see. The more you see, the more you know your own preferences. What's even more funny, the "detail perception" skill doesn't always sync to your guitar skill. So (for me at least) there are times when I'm thinking I'm the hottest stuff around (because I just mastered something I deemed important), and there are times when I'm down because my detail perception suddenly got better and turns out I would prefer to play with more nuance (but didn't learn how to yet)
- elevatortrim 6mo agoI can attest. After 7 years of practising guitar, the gap between my ability and my taste is even greater compared to when I started. Actually I can say the same thing for programming, I can build most software I would think of building when I started 20 years ago, but there is still a large gap between what I can build but what I discovered later and now would like to be able to build (I'd need to learn lots of maths in addition to other things).
- wvh 6mo agoA lot of us don't turn out to be professional musicians, writers or athletes. In between family and work, you start to realize how much these people put in to be at the top of their game. Time and effort you can't really put in if you didn't make the jump and have other life commitments. I guess that's why a lot of people grow old wondering what life would have been if they would have followed through on whatever talent they appeared to possess in youth.
- schwartzworld 6mo ago> Most people won't be able to keep at it I always tell people the secret to learning guitar fast is to practice for a minimum of 5 minutes a every day for 20 years. It's simultaneously a gross oversimplification while also literally being the only way to do it.
- kvgr 6mo agoI just started photography last year and it makes much sense. This and: - do it with intention, to copy or simulate to learn how to do what you want. If you just go out and take random pictures you will not learn much. If you go and try to simulate some style, lightning, you learn a lot. I also think most of my pictures really suck even if i try. But then i look on pictures of someone who has "photographer" in profile with couple thousand subscribers and most of their pictures also suck. I hope one day to bridge the gap.
- wookmaster 6mo agoAh yeah I feel this, I've done it as a hobby for a long time. One frustration I would have is how many photos I would take of a framing that I didn't like. I've spent a lot of time getting in my head that unless this is a moving object that focus is gonna be challenge I get ONE picture. Helps me sit with the framing there instead of just clicking away and having to post filter hundreds of photos. Still have to post filter hundreds of my kids though but it's worth it for some of the shots I get. Too bad they can't sit still.
- jazzyb 6mo agoStephen King said something similar (but I'm sure I'm misquoting): Every writer begins with one million terrible words inside them. The sooner you get those words out, the sooner you get to the good stuff.
- TimByte 6mo agoYes, the struggle is kind of the whole point
- customs2 6mo agoI get sad whenever I read this quote and know I was one of the people who quit. Not for lack of trying, I had severe mental issues that trained my mind to associate practice with distress. It caused my burnout twice on an optional activity The struggle is real for all people but in particular I feel robbed of resilience to even do anything. I can't speed up my therapy so the thought of years of practice being lost to time always hits me like a truck