Persistance is the key to ability, whether you have taste or not
Ira Glass puts perfectly a thought I had the other day when going through a stack of columns I had written in my first year of reporting at The West Australian. Being asked to write a column as a cadet journalist is a pretty big call and I can say I failed miserably (I think I got in three columns before they killed me off graciously.) Thankfully, the humiliation was shared between a few of us. Let me emphasis – reading them back was nothing short of torture, but I had a similar sense of dread at the time they were published. I knew they were bad. Ira talks about persisting past that stage where you know that what you doing is not that good – he describes it as the gap between your taste and ability. And yes, everybody goes through it. But it’s an important process and his advice is just brilliant and inspiring.
Definitely, a must watch for all aspiring journalists, but really it relates to many fields and things. Start-ups included. In fact, I feel the whole process has started over again in that regard.
In pre-service education (teacher training) there is a lot of discussion about graduating from unconsciously unskilled (you are crap, but don’t realise) to consciously unskilled (you are still crap, but you know). In fact, it seemed like the university was spitting out a lot of bad teachers who knew they weren’t all that great.
The key to escaping the consciously unskilled group, as well as Ira’s persistence, is reflection. We need to stop and think about our performance, and the difference between our performance and the ideal performance in our head.
I guess the reason the universities are not making great teachers from the start is that it isn’t possible. Great teachers are grown in front of classes. This is the art part of teaching, the creative part.
I’m sure the same thing applies in other creative endeavours, like your writing. You need persistence sure, but you also need to reflect on your work – exactly as you have done in this post.
Tis very similar to the 10,000 hours argument made by Gladwell in Outliers – talent is one thing, but talent plus 10,000 hours practise is what makes you a world champion.