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Ira Glass on the Creative Process

Posted by Alex

Ira Glass describes the importance of producing a lot of work to endeavor through the frustrating early stages of a creative career. The first two minutes of this video should be required viewing for anyone and everyone getting into a creative field. In his case, he’s talking about video production, but his points are easily applied to any other realm. Definitely one of the most inspiring (or illuminating) pieces of advice I’ve come across.

The first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good — it’s 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. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point 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. We knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have and the thing to do 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 or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to 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.