Stay in the gap

WHEN THE SAME TOPIC comes up in three sessions in the same day, I take note. In this case, it was Ira Glass’ famous “taste gap” story. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s short and worth a watch. But the gist of it is that when you start some new creative practice, you very quickly confront a gap between your taste and your ability. Your taste inspired you to the work, but when you’re just getting started, you can’t make work that’s as good as your taste demands.

This is where most people quit. You see some beautiful ceramics, sign up for a ceramics class, and when your first lumpy creations emerge from the kiln you conclude, well, this is not for me. You read a short story that cuts your heart open, and you sit down to do the same, and you end up with something that doesn’t even have the strength to knock on your heart’s door. As Glass notes, the difference between the person who bails at this point—and the person who goes on to make great work—isn’t talent but practice. “The most important possible thing you can do is, do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work,” he says. It will take years, probably, for your skill to catch up to your taste, but there’s no other way to get there. There are no shortcuts, no magic tricks, no way to download the skill to your brain, no faux-intelligence ready to do it for you. The work is the work.

This is the same point that Octavia Butler makes over and over, when she talks about persistence:

You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. It’s just so easy to give up!

If I may, I would like to extend this very astute observation, in three ways. The first is that the gap appears not only in work that is made up of atoms or sentences or pixels but also work that is primarily about people or influence or that has less material outcomes. If you’ve just stepped into a leadership role, and you have a notion of showing up the way one of your mentors does (confident, unflappable), you will be dismayed to witness yourself the first time someone gets under your skin and you perform entirely differently (reactive, hesitant, defensive). That, too, is the gap—between your perception of excellence and your observation of your own abilities. The gap shows up any time you practice a new skill or way of being or working in the world, whatever the product of that work is.

The second and in many ways more interesting thing I’ve noticed is that taste changes. What you perceive to be excellent—in a story, in a leader, in ceramics or painting or music or so on—is not static. As your skill grows, your attention evolves. You notice details you hadn’t seen before—the way that leader always pauses before responding to a question, the way your favorite writer builds up the pace then comes to an abrupt stop, the way the curve of that bowl fits into your hand. Some of the things you liked and appreciated when you first started to practice now look dull, a little amateur, not up to your current standards. Some of the things you dismissed now shine with astonishing complexity and beauty. And, most interestingly, you start to notice qualities in your own work that are unique to you. You become more tuned in to your own proclivities and habits, the things that work for you that may not ever work for anyone else. The way your sense of humor can diffuse tension, the way you like to play with sharp angles instead of curves, the way you use lists to illustrate a point. Where before your taste was an arrow pointed at other people’s work, now some of that energy comes back and directs itself inward. It’s as if your compass found a new magnetic pole to orient to, a new source of force and intensity.

And that brings me to the third point: the gap between your abilities and your taste is not a gap to be crossed but one to be cultivated. As you build your craft, whether it’s writing or radio or glass blowing or leading a team, you develop ever more ideas about what’s possible in your work. As your skill grows, so too do your ambitions, such that your taste always and forever outstrips your abilities. For every increment of improvement, you extend your desires out that much further. This is not to say you will never be satisfied with your work—although, that is a not uncommon scenario, and not necessarily as dreary as it sounds. But rather that as you become more capable, you are wont to find as much joy and satisfaction in the process of developing your skill as in the outcomes of it. The work of creativity, at the end of the day, is the work of creativity—not what you create, but who you become in the act of creation.

The gap is not a void, not an empty space you must endure on the way to greatness. It is not a punishment or confinement, not a prison you must escape. It’s fertile soil under a bright blue sky, a cool, meandering spring, and a pocket full of seeds. It’s a verdant valley in the shade of a snowy mountain peak. As you watch, the snow melts and the peak changes shape, but it remains ever a point of attention, even as your seeds grow into tall, broad trees that gleam and wave beneath the stars.