Maybe you’ve seen it scroll across your Instagram feed. Maybe you’ve heard it on a YouTube clip. But more than likely, if you’re in a field that involves creativity and craft – and journalism is absolutely such a field – you’ve become familiar with Ira Glass’ famous quote about the “taste gap.”
“For the first couple of years you make stuff,” Glass once said, “what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good. But it’s not quite that good. … A lot of people never get past that phase. … They quit. … 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. … It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that.”
It’s a critical message for creators, a light beam of faith from those who have clawed through the darkness. Keep working and creating, Glass tells us, and we’ll get to a place where our taste matches our ambition.
But I’m not sure if that place truly exists.