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.