the gap
Exposure Therapy 2/100
Why this experiment?
There’s this really popular piece of advice that’s been floating about in the creative zeitgeist for years now, that can be summarised as such:
When you start doing creative work, at first, you suck. Or your work sucks (but it feels like you just suck). This is because you have better taste than ability, at least in the beginning. The way to close the gap between your taste and your ability is to do a large volume of work.
Below is the video I saw online (there are loads of variations, my favourite one is here).
This wisdom came from Ira Glass on his public radio show, This American Life, full text below:
Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really 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, you know what I mean?
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they 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 — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
And the thing I would say to 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 — you gotta 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. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
There are a couple things to unpack here:
Why do so many beginners have good taste and relatively terrible ability?
I think it’s because we are drawn to the art that speaks to us, way before we ever reach a point where we can articulate why it resonates. So we consume and consume and consume this art, naturally and without thinking, because this art that speaks to us is like water in a desert - a relief.
Through this relentless consumption we hone our tastes and preferences, and we develop a sense of what we like and why, we hone the ability to recognise what good art is, at least to our own mind.
But few of us will ever create half as relentlessly as we consume. To some it comes naturally, it’s like a compulsion almost. There are among us those creative souls who can’t not do their thing - but even among those people there are relatively few whose creative compulsion survives judgement, or doubt, or aloneness, or the drive to do something more “sensible” with their time. For most people the creative compulsion - the muse - either dies or falls into a dormancy from which it may never wake. So the creative muscle atrophies, while we continue to get better at consuming.
I think partly this is because consuming is socially so easy, and creating anything makes us vulnerable. But this means that when it’s time to create, when you can’t ignore the compulsion any longer, when your muse finally wakes up and bangs on the door and demands to take its seat at the table, you finally start making shit - and you feel like a child learning to hold a pencil for the first time. It’s awkward, and hard, and you suck. Or, sorry, your work sucks. And while your work sucks, if you’re doing it in public, you also have the mortifying circumstance of conspicuously taking yourself seriously in front of people you know, while your work sucks. This is hard! As Ira says above, a lot of people quit at this point. A lot of creative dreams die in the self-conscious chasm between taste and ability.
How does doing a large volume of work hone your ability?
I don’t think it does - at least not directly. You could spend years doing a large volume of terrible work, and never learn from your mistakes, or you could spend years doing work that starts terrible, but you could figure out what made the first attempt terrible, and you could improve that for the second attempt, and you could keep iterating like this until eventually your work is not actually terrible. I think this is also what people get wrong about the 10,000 hours rule1.
So the point here is not just to do a large volume of work, but to start each piece with intention - in my case, this means I shouldn’t just write these posts for the sake of clocking up 100 so I can say I did the experiment. I should be aiming to make each one better than the last, in whatever way seems most appropriate. I’m not exactly sure how to do that, but I’m figuring it out. That’s why it’s an experiment.
In any case, this is what I’m hoping: by forcing myself to do 100 posts in public, I practice two things:
taking my work seriously, in front of real people, even as it’s in its ugly, graceless adolescence - this makes me cringe, but if I want to ever be a writer for an audience of more than just myself, I have to get through this part.
it’s worth noting that you don’t actually have to work in public in order to practice your craft - I just know that unless I’m accountable to some external pressure, I won’t do the work. Facing my inadequacies alone is too scary. Plus, feedback helps me improve! And encouragement helps me continue.
consistency - by making this experiment public, the schedule becomes more important than my self-consciousness. When the schedule is more important, I have no choice but to publish. This is me trying to find a balance between forcing myself to finish posts, and allowing myself (just) enough space to think about and edit each post. Previously I’ve had no guardrails and there has therefore been nothing to stop me from overanalysing each piece until it’s a long, convoluted mess. And then I never published, because of course, nothing was ever good enough. But now I have no choice but to publish! So I might as well also make each post as good as I can, but only within these constraints. I’m not sure this will work as I intend it to, but as Steve Trevor said, you can either do nothing or you can something. And I’ve already tried nothing.
“Malcolm Gladwell published his blockbuster book, Outliers, in 2008 and the most talked-about idea from the text was the 10,000 Hour Rule. Gladwell, citing research by K. Anders Ericsson, explained that the key to becoming world-class in any field was to practice a specific task for at least 10,000 hours." - James Clear, How Experts Practice Better Than the Rest