A few days ago, I published an essay convincing you to be prolific. I was elaborating on the idea that focusing on quantity will lead to better quality, a lesson I learned in 2013. When I was writing that original post, I came across a useful metaphor from Ira Glass, about how people experience a gap between their taste and their skills when they’re doing their early work. 

Ira suggested that the best way to close this gap was to focus on making a huge volume of work. Here’s the source video, and the quote in full:

“Everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste. They could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. 

The thing I would tell you is everybody goes through that, and for you to go through it—if you’re going through it right now—if you’re just getting out of that phase gotta know 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. Put yourself on deadline, so every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story.

You create the deadline. It’s best to have somebody who’s going to be waiting for work from you; somebody who’s expecting it from you, even if it’s not somebody who pays you, but you’re in a situation where you have to churn out the work.

It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap, and the work that you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

It’s been over a decade since I first came across this concept, and I still find the idea of the gap incredibly useful. The image, to me, appears as if each piece of work you publish is a brick to build a bridge between your taste and your skills. With each piece of work you publish, you lay another brick. 

Once you build your first bridge, and you can reliably make interesting new things, something interesting happens: your taste changes. Another gap emerges, and your skills once again need to improve. The process starts over again, and again.

When I posted my recent essay to Hacker News, the ensuing discussion led me back to Ira Glass and the gap. I also came across a new quote attributed to Samuel Butler, “Everyone has a mass of bad work in him which he will have to work off and get rid of before he can do better—and indeed, the more lasting a man’s ultimate good work is, the more sure he is to pass through a time, and perhaps a very long one, in which there seems very little hope for him at all. We must all sow our spiritual wild oats.”