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“Your taste is why your work disappoints you.”
Ira Glass
I’ve written a daily essay for almost 300 days.
Most days what I publish falls short of what I imagined.
Ira Glass hosts This American Life. As a college kid he walked into NPR’s Washington office and offered to work the summer for free. He cut tape, wrote newscasts and filled in wherever they needed him.
By his account he couldn’t write and structure a story well until he was almost 30. Years later he described that stretch in an interview about storytelling:
“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 a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
The gap between my taste and my output closed in nine posts so far.
How-I Beats How-To packs a big idea into a short, high-signal post. When knowing how to do something turns into a commodity, the story of how you did it becomes valuable.
Compound Lifts is where everything in my life started to become material for essays, even a 5K I walked on a treadmill during my mastermind calls.
How to Get Lucky in Life looks back on an important stretch of my life through my experiments habit and the rooms it led me to.
Do Less, Get More: The F1 Math was published as I was still trying to understand the power of removal. Each time I explain this essay to someone, my appreciation of the piece deepens.
We Are All Investors was one of my first tries at showing that we invest more important resources than money.
Consistent But No Progress? It’s the Hurdle Rate speaks to how you can be consistent and still fall behind. The idea of hurdle rates is underappreciated. This was an early attempt at getting the concept of minimum effective doses across to people.
Why Mormons Get Rich and Adventists Live to 100 was a great title and I was surprised to see that readers shared my esoteric interest in religious habits.
Habit Banking: What You Can Bank and What You Can’t was the first time I shared how I picture habits as reserves that you can build ahead of time. This became the basis for the habit app I built and use each day.
The Math of Inevitable Success passed on another internal model about how persistence combined with avoiding ruin makes success a question of when. Not if.
Out of almost 300 essays, nine have matched my taste.
Volume is how you close the gap between your work and your taste.
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What commitment could you keep until your work matches your taste?
