I love that perspective. To add to it, from personal experience: it really helps to be totally, wildly, embarrassingly ignorant of your incompetence at the start. It softens that part where your work disappoints you, because you don't know better. Now, I don't know if this is actually good advice or even actionable, advice, but I've seen it and experienced it many times and it very much enabled me to move past awfulness.

- My first programs (I thought `super` gave you access to the UI component's hierarchical owner)

- My first music videos (wow super cringey teen stuff)

- My first 3D animations (oh so you're supposed to use "textures"?)

- Why I never got good at guitar (constantly focused on how my whole family had to suffer how awful I was)

All formative experiences I may have never dove so deeply into if I was consciously aware of just how far off the mark I was. I can't even look at any of these examples today because I cringe so hard at myself.

Your guitar story reminded me of my one of my own. My uncle gave me an old crappy guitar for Christmas while they were driving through to visit other relatives. He was a signed musician at the time so he had all sorts of extra instruments laying around that companies would send him just because.

Later that next year for my birthday (today actually, but a few years ago!), my family gave me one of those "Learn Guitar" books with an included DVD. At this point I had been playing for about 8 months and they actually said they had bought it way back in March or April because I was so bad they wanted me to get better for their own sanity. However, they said they almost felt bad giving it to me then because it didn't seem like I needed it anymore.

I had progressed far enough that it didn't sound like terrible screeching anymore and was mostly passable music. Simple chords and basic strumming patterns sure, but music nonetheless. :)

So if you've still got your guitar, I urge you to pull it out and give it another shot. Find some songs you like that are simple and just keep at it. Making music should always be about expressing yourself first and pleasing others second.

Good luck :)

I've got young kids and I am the captain now. I am guitaring again. They love it and can't possibly judge my horrible rendition of Wheels on the Bus.

Happy Birthday ! I had a guitar that my (not a musician) uncle gifted me too. Never stuck with it long enough. Last year (after we moved to another country) I was gifted a Ukelele. My family still recognizes my longing wish for learing to make music this I guess. Thanks for sharing.

Happy birthday!

An alternative to ignorance is to be enthralled by the process. I knew many of my programs weren't great or amazing growing up, but I was too into the puzzle of how programs and programming works to care. The result was, frankly, secondary to the process.

I'm not an amazing piano player, but with a MIDI keyboard and headphones I can gameify it, enjoy the process of practice and learning, measure progress even when it's sometimes hard to see, and do this all even if I'm still skittish about actually performing any of it for others.

With something like art - I have trouble seeing my progress, gamifying it, I have a certain vicious judgement of my own work beyond what I judge the art of others by, and I'm not particularly into the process for it's own sake. I haven't made any progress there since high school!

I wish I still had my music videos and more of the art I made. I found stuff I created when I was a teenager and younger that I'd totally forgotten about. Things I modeled in software, things I sketched, things I built from Lego, things I wrote, music I made, things I crafted from wood and leather by hand.

I almost got teary eyed thinking about how amazing adult me considered the work of child me and all of the free time and creative energy that came with it. I'd do anything to be able to get that kind of creativity back. But I suspect it was a function of both youth and not having a job that draws upon my mental resources so heavily.

> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

On the whole, I agree with his sentiment that hard work will get you success, but the idea he magically started out with some kind of innate talent for telling whether or not things are good is the same type of illogical thinking he's talking about being discouraging to beginners.

I think you're interpreting 'good taste' too narrowly. A sense of the value of things is what motivates people to want to produce them. So if you value nice things enough to want to make more of them, that's 'good taste'. He's not saying taste is an immutable attribute that cannot be refined.

He's not writing an essay on the relationship between taste, skill and creativity and how they feed back into each other. I think he's just saying stick in there. It's tough for everyone in the beginning, and this is one reason why.

Talent is a real thing, it isn't magic. Each of us has a unique brain with unique programming/experience and some of us are more or less capable at various tasks. When I type stuff like this out I start to wonder why this has to be explained.

I agree. It seems that his overall position could be stronger if he just started with the requisite of having some taste. Which everybody has.

It'd still all ring true, and be more general, in the sense that one's taste is linked to who one is (your unique background and life experience). So in general this condition of relative uniqueness, saying nothing of it's subjective quality or goodness, could still be enough to make one's creative efforts worth something, inasmuch they'll probably be relatively unique.

Entirely agree. In art school our instructors often spoke of developing your eye. By seeing many things, thinking about them in depth and doing exercises you develop the skills needed to appreciate, differently the things you see. It was never about fostering some innate "taste" or aesthetic you had to get out. Talent surely does exist but you have no idea about it as a beginner. Talent functions on a level far beyond what most people think, before that comes passion, much time invested and the fruits of this are what most people mistake as talent.

He doesn't say anyone "magically started out" with good taste. He's saying he had it when he started trying to get good at making his own stuff. At that point, he - presumably - had a lot of experience consuming media, and he had plenty of time to develop his understanding of what he thought was "good" and "not good". It's true that that understanding doesn't necessarily match society at large, although in the case of Ira his success indicates that it matched well enough with enough people.

Something that's not mentioned in the quote but that I think is really important is the fact that the media he was consuming in training his "ear" was - in our culture of mass-media - predominately produced by some of the very best of the very best (by some metric). Of course your early efforts are going to pale by comparison.

I've seen this interview pop up several times but I've always lacked the context to properly understand it, because I don't know who Ira Glass is and what he has done. I don't deny that it's good advice, but who is this guy and why should I listen to him?

Ira Glass is the creator and host of a long running radio show called This American Life on National Public Radio. The show runs weekly and tells stories of Americana and other things. I suspect part of what makes the show famous is that it coined not just a particular kind of show, but a particular kind of sound, editing and production, that, I’d say set the standard for modern audio programs.

Several of the shows producers (and Ira’s mentees) have gone on to create other famous shows:

- Sarah Koenig created Serial, one of the first truly mainstream podcasts (1M listeners in its first week) for telling, in the first season, the story of a murder of Haymen Lee and investigating whether the man convicted, Adnan Syed, was likely innocent.

- Alex Blumberg created Planet Money, a short radio show that explores economics and explains it by looking at what’s happening, culturally, around the world. Later, Blumberg founded Gimlet, a podcast company that recently sold to Spotify for $100M, ostensibly to create content with that, now famous, NPR _sound_. Some of the bigger/more famous work from Gimlet is Startup (now also a TV show in the US), Homecoming (now also a show on Amazon Prime Video), Reply All, and Conviction.

Anyway, Ira Glass has hosted This American Life since the beginning, and Blumberg recently interviewed him for a show Gimlet produces called Without Fail. If you’re looking to understand his impact in this space, I think that’s a wonderful place to start.

*edited to correct where the Homecoming TV show airs.

The bit about his mentees and the 'NPR sound' helps a lot and does create that important context.

First time I saw his interview, I did some light googling and as far as I could tell, he was some kind of host/writer. I'd gander most non-Americans haven't even heard of NPR and thus cannot really understand the impact it had/has. Much less his mentees and their various offshoots.

Homecoming is on Amazon Prime Video

>I don't deny that it's good advice, but who is this guy and why should I listen to him?

Shouldn't you listen to it because it's good advice, regardless of who the guy is?

And isn't it a Google search away from knowing everything about the person?

I'm not dismissing his advice, I'm curious about the cultural context of why his advice is important.

It's like leaving comments in code. I know what the code does, but I don't know why you did it this particular way. Google tells me he's a famous/important person, it rarely doesn't explain why he's more famous/important than other famous/important people.

He's the host of an NPR radio program called This American Life.

> ... the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work ... 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

This volume of work coupled with a closed feedback loop (Do - observe - measure - tweak - Do) allows for achieving astonishing results. Also taking a skill apart, practicing and improving individual skills and then putting it all together is the basis of acquiring and mastering skill.

I do not believe a mentor can help with acquiring skill. But a good mentor can quickly identify and guide you to the parts that need attention and practice.

Zen pencils has a lovely take on that: https://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginne...

That was exactly the problem I identified with my photography. I can identify and appreciate the good stuff, but my skills are lagging behind. So frustrating.

Within the context of people learning to code, I feel that many people in this field don't "distaste" their work until they're shown the next step up they can make. So, not mentoring to know where to start, but mentoring to discover where to go next?

This is nice but I don't see how it is relevant to the article: "Here's some advice about mentorship." -- "Here is better unrelated advice!"

Taste is for curators who masquerade as creators.

The actual concept for people who create is that your hand is behind your eye.

Edit: To the asshole downvoter. This is actually serious advice that myself and many others have found very important in our lives doing creative work. Censoring it is a total shit thing to do. Especially when you appear to have nothing additional to add.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I know the guidelines. But that downvote was incredibly low quality and I chose to make an exception. It's unfortunate that someone needs to censor discussion of someone that actually does creative work for a living and of a comment that was not inflammitory or off topic without anything of value to add on their part.

There is even another comment in this thread that continues to discuss "taste". Which is the absolute 100% worst way to think about creative work. Taste is like the bootcamp for creative work. It will get you shallow quick results that will not extend anywhere past the introductory levels. At which point your work will stagnate.

What does "your hand is behind your eye" mean, and how does that relate to taste? I don't understand what advice you're giving.

(FYI, your comment could have come across as implying that Ira Glass is a fraud who's just a "curator" pretending to be a "creator," so that could be why someone took offense.)

In the most literal sense, in anything that involves hand-eye coordination - say, hand-drawing some parallel lines - you can never hand better than you can eye, because if you can't see that you're a little off to the left, you can't correct for that no matter how precisely you can move your hand.

In a more metaphorical sense, you can't correct for a fault you can't recognise. So a writer can only avoid cliches if they can recognise them, a photographer has to be able to recognise what will make a good photo in order to take a good photo, and so on.

Of course you can avoid faults you can't recognise by random chance, imitating things that avoid those faults, or tools that take care of it without you noticing.