Why Everything You Make Feels Wrong

“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 it’s 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.”

— Ira Glass

The gap is real. You know exactly what good looks like because you've spent years consuming it. You can point to the exact moment in a film where the cinematography elevates the scene. You can hear when a song's production feels rushed. You can tell when writing lacks rhythm or when a design feels cluttered.

Then you sit down to create something yourself and it comes out wrong. The vision in your head was clear and the execution is muddy. You wanted to make something that moved people and instead you made something that barely moves you.

Most people interpret this gap as evidence they're not meant to do creative work. They think talent is supposed to be obvious from the beginning, that if you were really good at something it wouldn't feel this hard. So they quit before they ever close the distance between their taste and their skills.

Your taste is sophisticated because you've spent thousands of hours absorbing great work. Your skills are underdeveloped because you've spent comparatively no time creating. The gap exists because input always precedes output. You learned to appreciate quality long before you learned to produce it.

Every artist you admire went through years of making work that embarrassed them. They just didn't quit during those years. They kept showing up, kept iterating, kept closing the gap incrementally until one day their skills finally matched their taste.

Just consistent output. Finishing things even when they disappoint you. Especially when they disappoint you.

Each finished piece, no matter how flawed, teaches you something the next piece benefits from. You learn what doesn't work by making things that don't work. You develop intuition by repeatedly making decisions and seeing their consequences. You close the gap by refusing to let the gap stop you from creating.

The people who make it are not more talented than the people who quit. They're just more stubborn about working through the phase where everything they make feels inferior to everything they admire.

Your taste is better than your skills right now. That's supposed to be torture. That torture is the fuel. It's what keeps you iterating, improving, refusing to settle for mediocre work. The day your taste and your skills align is the day you stop being a beginner.

Until then, make the work. Finish the work. Repeat.

The gap closes through volume, not through waiting.

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See you on the next stair,
Alastair