Loads of Work

Ira Glass knows what he’s talking about.

Do a huge amount of work until you get better. That’s Ira Glass’s message in this short video. That seems like the best way to master any creative trade. At a certain point, it’s frustrating when you create a design and understand it’s nowhere near the level you want it to be at. When I analyze a freshly finished web design, I can tell it’s nothing special. However, I can’t tell exactly why it’s not special. If I knew what to add, I’d learn about it and add it in as soon as I could. The creator’s eye is often blind to faults that are clearly visible to observers.

This is the reason we give college essays to other people to read and rip apart. I bet you’re shocked to find so many annotations when you get back a paper from a friend or a teacher. It proves how blind we are when it comes to improving our own creative work. Maybe this is why it takes so long to master a skill. We grow so little between every work since we only improve upon the handful of errors we’re able to see.

An easy way to grow faster is to hand out your work to others for feedback, like you would an essay. The idea of getting feedback on creative work can be daunting. You’re giving the world (or just a small subset of it) permission to criticize the product you’ve made from your own skill. What you get in return is usually awesome though. Every error that was written in invisible ink before is now scrawled in red sharpie across your creation. Basically, with great feedback comes great growth. Feedback becomes necessary in order to get better without moving at a snail’s pace.

Ira Glass has a lovely idea but I think feedback was a key idea that he should have discussed in his talk. So to me it seems like the process for mastering any creative skill is to do a huge amount of work and receive a huge amount of feedback that helps push you forward.