Somewhat ironic that the people who can have the easiest time continuing to create actually lack the taste to know how bad they are and consequently donât actually get any better. I wish the idea would die, that doing a lot of something (10,000 hours or a million words or whatever) lets you get better. It doesnât. Itâs dispassionate criticism of what youâve done that guides your improvement. If you do nothing but make shoddy dovetail joints for ten years and never ask why your furniture keeps falling apart, youâre not going to get better.
And you can trust me on this. I have written ten million words of crap in random thread comments, so I know what Iâm talking about.
Oh, I should add, I actually love that video and would marry Ira Glass, but his crazy dog, and wife, rule that out.
The comedian Tommy Cooper apparently had very little idea why people found him so funny. He couldnât pin down what it was that would make people laugh, so he used to try ideas out and polish them based on audience feed back. It must be a very stressful experience, like surfing a wave of blazing tigers.
I was going to write a witty, insightful comment about this video, but I realized that I could never be as profound as I would hope to be.
For me after passing this phase, the creation of art has gotten even more difficult. There is not quite the same joy of discovery and newness. Trying to improve my work at this point or at least keep it at the same level has been stressful and has caused many days/months of painters block. Keeping up with external expectations as well as internal. It is hard to describeâŚ
Respectfully, I think itâs just as bad to completely rule it out (as much as it is to say itâs the only way).
I think the point many people miss about the 10,000 hour rule is that itâs not just the time you put in, but the considerable amount of time spent trying to improve on oneâs past efforts.
==thinking about paraphrasing the quote about doing the exact same thing over and over==
Ambitions!
The deadly combo, then, is good taste and an inability to stay focused on one topic. You just wind up frustrated and jumping from thing to thing youâd like to do. Pretty sure Iâm in that camp.
Although sometimes it seems your tastes are so much better than everyone elseâs that what is crap to you is passable to everyone else, and you can get by. I think thatâs called school for many people.
I just started the rpm challenge (rpmchallenge.com) and man, I needed to hear this today.
Iâll just keep on trying!
How is this a rant? Itâs a passionate call for new creatives to not give up.
My question is: When youâre still in the gap, what do you do with all that not-very-good stuff that youâre making? If you know your art is a failure, youâre not going to want to share it (this is particularly true of writing, where youâre asking the reader to invest a lot of time and focus)âŚbut itâs also not very rewarding if all you do when you finish a project is save it to your hard drive and move on to the next thing.
Where is the reward system that motivates you to keep creating while your work is still sub-par? Or is it just 10,000 hours of delayed gratification?
This may be sort of a âdefinition #3â on the word, but a passionate speech does fall under the umbrella of ârantâ. Angry passion is the norm, but not exactly a prerequisite.
Traditionally, artists simply destroy the old stuff thatâs not cutting it. Some painters used to scrape/sand down the canvas, and paint a new painting over it. Others would shred it, while others would burn it with fire â something that I figure happened to a few drafts of possible novels, too.
This reminds me of one of my early paintings that my dad got a hold of during a house move that I wasnât present for. As much as I beg for its return, he wonât give it up. Itâs rather bad, and itâs going to be destroyed before heâs even cold in the ground.
The theory being: Never let people see your worst work. Let it be water under the bridge.
As for the motivation, my assumption is that itâs mainly a dissatisfaction with the gap - understanding that improvement is itâs own reward.
My mentor used to tell me that painting will always be a learning process. There is no finish line.
As a writer, me and my girlfriend has a blog to publish all of our short stories. Weâre pushing ourselves to write and itâs not important if itâs good or bad, weâre just putting all of the stories there. This also let us see what weâve done so far and it motivates us.
I think you are making the mistake of focusing your attention on the 90 percent of everything that is shit. Focus on what you love, on what does work.
I will try to do the same.
well, what about not-so-new creatives? cause me, i go through that every fucking day of my life. nothing is ever good enough⌠good enough for a minute maybe, good enough with the right outside validation⌠for a minute, if iâm lucky, for a day. and then it all starts over again. drove me into performance, oh the instant gratification⌠good for a little while, until i go home, go to sleep, get up the next day to do battle once again.
maybe thatâs what art is all about⌠that battle. because there are no easy solutions or perhaps there are no easy problems either. too often i have seen people produce copious blather cause if the blather is not rigorously torn into, itâs still just the noise of a deaf blatherer.
Save it for when you get rich and famous. Then you can get even more rich by selling it to an archive.
(a) itâs more like 99.9%
(b) You are literally telling me to focus on the good stuff, when the whole point of the video is that you canât avoid the bad stuff until your ability catches up with your taste. My only point about the 10000 hour âruleâ is that itâs functionally meaningless. Doing 10000 hours of something that is judged will make you get better, but just doing it is no guarantee.
I dunno. I feel you were answering a point that neither I nor the video made.
As an eternal, internal editor⌠âMy girlfriend and I have a blog to publish our short stories. Weâre pushing ourselves to write but itâs unimportant whether itâs good or bad, weâre just putting all of the stories on there so we can see what weâve done so far. That alone is enough to motivate us.â
If I ever start posting in Turkish youâre welcome to point out my mistakes - because we only really learn by knowing what we did wrong.
Exactly. Thanks for pointing them out 
