On Beginning

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or 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. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

― Ira Glass

I first heard this quote about six years ago in a class on writing for publication. At the time, I felt like a beginner in professional writing — the quote offered me some encouragement to just keep drafting and drafting until my work matched up with my ambitions to write professionally. The second time it showed up in a graphic video on my YouTube sidebar, I was thinking about my desire to get better at radio and podcasting. The third time, about a week ago, I was thinking about how I was a beginner in blogging, starting this website.

As humans, and as creatives, we’re always starting something. There isn’t a final date where we know everything and have mastered every single skill we could ever want to learn. Because once we’ve mastered one skill, we seek to become beginners in another, to expand our knowledge and abilities to tell stories. It’s a good thing; it means we’re intellectually curious, always exploring, always learning.

So here’s a reminder for all of us beginners. Just because we’re starting out with something doesn’t mean that we don’t have the potential to one day be experts. Just because we don’t get it right away doesn’t mean we weren’t “cut out” for it. It just means it’s time to get down to work, to start finishing one story, one podcast, one blog post every single week. To close that gap through creating and creating and creating.

If you needed a sign that today is the day to start working on that idea you’ve been sitting on, unsure of how to begin, here it is. Or if you need a reminder that there is a time when all of this will get easier, and that it takes time to make great things, you can take that, too.

Every day, each of us is a beginner in something. There’s no shame in it, only the potential for growth. So let’s proudly declare that we are beginners, embarking on a journey to something extraordinary. And that this moment of being a beginner? It’s beautiful in and of itself.

Heck, if Ira Glass, one of the greatest storytellers of our time, thinks that the state of the beginner is worth an entire paragraph, then what more proof do we need?