I know that I’m not as good as I want to be in several areas of creative practice (drawing, public speaking, to name a few). It doesn’t mean that I do a bad job, it can serve its purposes well (and if it doesn't, then it's better to delegate it to someone else).
But it could be fantastic, because you can recognize fantastic work when it’s in front of you. And knowing that it’s not there yet secretly drives me crazy sometimes.
Can’t everyone see?
So I found great relief in the advice of This American Life’s host and producer Ira Glass, where he speaks precisely about this feeling:
Animation by David Shiyang Liu.
“Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste 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, you know what I mean?
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
And the most important possible 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. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
”
It's easier to recognize beauty than it is to create it.
When you find yourself in this frustrating limbo, the challenge is to never forget what got you there in the first place. You already have good taste. Go build work until it matches your ambitions. Close the gap.