It has been a while since Iâve seen this one floating around. Excellent advice.
âNobody 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 itâs like there is this gap. For the first couple years that youâre making stuff, what youâre making isnât so good. Itâs not that great. Itâs trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but itâs 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 youâre 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 wasnât 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 youâre going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that youâre going to catch up and close that gap. And the work youâre making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone Iâve ever met. It takes awhile. Itâs gonna take you a while. Itâs normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.â
