Ira Glass, and the gap

A few days ago, I published an essay convincing you to be prolific. I was elaborating on the idea that focusing on quantity will lead to better quality, a lesson I learned in 2013. When I was writing that original post, I came across a useful metaphor from Ira Glass, about how people experience a gap between their taste and their skills when they’re doing their early work. Ira suggested that the best way to close this gap was to focus on making a huge volume of work. Here’s the source video, and the quote in full: “Everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste. They could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. The thing I would tell you 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 gotta know it’s totally…