Good Taste

Play big. Great advice.

I wanted to play big from the start.

I felt small.

I don’t know. Maybe they were right?

“This is the worst possible time to start a business!”

“You are throwing away your career!”

“Do you suddenly develop an aversion to money?”

“Is this a mid life crisis?”

I started this blog.  I opened my first comment.

“You are such a………..”

People want me to fail?

I didn’t understand.

There is resistance. There always is.

Support helps.  So does the work.

He hired me.  So did heHe did too.

I caught a break and that phone started to ring.

They started hiring me.

Momentum.

More work.

I always had good taste.

It just takes a little while for the work to catch up.

Ira Glass on taste:

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that 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, and 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 it’s normal and 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. 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.”

Keep learning.  Keep going. You get better.

Creating something new is hard work.

The good news?

In challenge we often find growth and our most meaningful evolution.

Even better?

I still have pretty good taste.  So do you.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

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