Ira Glass, host of This American Life (NPR), offers this advice for anyone who is a beginner. He talks about being driven to create by good taste only to be profoundly disappointed by the results.

For beginners this can be deadly.

It’s so true and not just for beginners. I believe that for most of us there is always a disconnect between the vision we hold in our imagination and what we are actually able create.

Personally, it drives me to continually increase my skill but it no longer stops me from creating and putting what I create out into the world. It’s part of what keeps me engaged.

Coming to terms with this gap is one of the initiations we receive in our creative development and it’s essential to developing the ongoing practice of creativity. In the end, I think, we come to accept that this striving to close the gap between vision and work is an essential part of the creative process.

I would even go so far as to say that if you have so mastered your medium that you’re completely satisfied with what you produce, you either need to do some serious stretching within your medium or begin anew with another.

Ira Glass is right…without an awareness of this this gap between taste and output, beginners are often discouraged enough to give up.

It is in this phase of creative development that teachers can make or break their student’s commitment to the ongoing work of creating. Unfortunately I hear way too many stories of teachers reenforcing the beginner’s sense of inadequacy.

This is the advice teachers should be imparting to each and every one their students…

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

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