I know it gets shared often, but I think now is a good time share it again. Here is Ira Glass' piece on what every successful person knows, but never says: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For 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 that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, 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. They quit. Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that. And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important 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. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.Every time I want to create something or have an idea for a project or whatever it feels like somebody's already done it better and 1,000,000 people have already seen it and there's no point in even starting.
I guess nobody should ever write their first song, or put paint to canvass for the first time, because someone else already has. From Ira Glass:
There is also another important side to that quote. For the most part, none of your audience has your idealised image in their head. None of them know what you'd want your perfect work to be like if you could magic it out of mind verbatim. What is most important to you may be less important, or even negligible, to the average audience experiencing it. For example, take this now five year old track of mine: Example 1 There is a number of negative points that could be made against the composition and production quality of this track. Within the first 30 seconds I could give a good list of ways in which it didn't match my internal visions. I'm sure any layman could probably point out that it doesn't completely live up to the pinnacle of either of those facets if pressed. (That's not to say I wasn't happy with this track at the time) However, that hasn't stopped it garnering over 200,000 views and a plethora of wonderful comments. This was only about a year and a half after I started producing electronic music. Granted, I got a lucky break on a promotional channel that has now gone on to become a massive promotions company, but I still think it demonstrates the point I'm trying to make. Even if we go back in time a few months from the above track and listen to one that is markedly worse and was only self-promoted, it still got some nice attention: Example 2 I am not saying this to stroke my ego (okay, maybe a little) but rather to try and demonstrate that people don't care if the product isn't perfect. There are those who will enjoy and even love your work whilst to you it seems lacklustre and disappointing. No-one else knows or cares to think about what it could be like. We are our own biggest critics, and this is generally a positive force when channelled correctly. But don't let it stop you from finding joy and love in the pursuits you chose to follow.
Haha, you're not the first person to express that sentiment! However, as much as it would make my life a whole lot easier, I don't think that generic liquid drum & bass would satisfy my composition MA's marking criteria. Anyway, 'old stuff' remains 'old stuff' because there comes a time where you evolve or lose your soul. At least that's the way it's always been for me.
What often overlooked is that they have, but you (I, we, whoever is trying to get in) have not. What Ira Glass has said is actually kind of sad. Sad from the point of view that no one told him the most basic part of any learning process, that it takes time and practice to make any effort worth looking at. That used to be taught at school. Parents used to tell that to their kids, all the time. We have lost the power of apprenticeship, or in other words, the power of knowing the learning process of learning. if It comes down to a TL;DR I'm sure people told him; he didn't listen, then it took him "longer".I guess nobody should ever write their first song, or put paint to canvass for the first time, because someone else already has.