While I driving around recently, I heard an interview with This American Life creator, Ira Glass, talking about the early days of his career (from about 16:00-20:00 minutes)
The main thrust of that segment was a combination of the brief comments he made in 2009 on storytelling and creativity and the myth that people are essentially born proficient geniuses that I have addressed before.
As in his comments from 2009 (illustrated below in kinetic typography), Glass says when he was first starting out his working at NPR HQ in Washington, DC, the quality of what he was producing was bad to adequate.
As he looked around, he felt like everyone around him had some magical power to know exactly what was needed to make something good- emphasize a point here, edit something out there, etc. He didn’t think he would ever learn that skill. He even resorted to paying people around the office at NPR $50 to look at his work, figuring it was cheaper than going to graduate school.
Ultimately, he realized that obtaining proficiency was a largely a matter of experience, logging the hours and making mistakes.
It may require making mistakes for a long time. In the same 2009 segment that the kinetic type video above is excerpted from, Glass plays a piece he wrote in his eighth year of reporting and critiques it. He admits he doesn’t even understand what his point was and then gives a one sentence description of the situation which is interesting and comprehensible.
I bring up this idea periodically on my blog because I think it is important to be reminded that just because something/someone amazing seems to pop out of nowhere, that success may have been decades in the making.
The interviewer at WOUB was of the same mind. He specifically prefaces his request that Ira Glass talk about this experience “because we have a lot of students that listen…” Glass agrees noting that whenever you see a movie about an artist, they are always depicted as being great and inspired from the beginning, but that isn’t true to life.
In an early part of the interview, Glass notes that they kill around 50% of the stories at This American Life–not the ideas, the actual stories they are in the process of working on or have completed. So even as acclaimed as he and his team are, they are regularly making mistakes or producing work that falls short. Glass says their success is as much attributable to being ruthless about cutting as it is to being capable story tellers.
The idea that you shouldn’t become so emotionally involved with your work that you can’t let it go is not a new one, but it is a lesson that is worth revisiting from slightly different perspectives.