Ira Glass on Storytelling
I just found this video over at Get Rich Slowly and thought what this guy is saying about storytelling is equally true for my own current situation.
On the surface he may be talking about storytelling, but what he actually says is true for pretty much any kind of work:
When you start out, you have dreams and ambitions and you have big plans. But what you actually produce is crap. And the worst thing is, you can tell it’s crap.
“A lot of people never get past that phase,” he says. “A lot of people at that point, they quit.”
But – here comes the consoling part – he goes on to say that you have to understand that everybody goes through a phase like this in the beginning and the people who actually manage to achieve success with any kind of work are obviously the ones that don’t quit. The ones that muddle through and keep bumbling along, trying to get better and learn from their mistakes.
And what can I say, he’s right. Now, coming from somebody who just quit something, this might sound a bit hypocritical. But, you see, this course I quit was most emphatically NOT one of my dreams. It was just something that seemed like a good idea for, like, 10 minutes, and then like a bloody mistake for the rest of the time. But I was too scared to change the whole situation with a drastic break.
Now I have finally made this break and a huge load lifted off my shoulders. I am brimming with new ideas and plans and, yes, even dreams which I will start working towards now. But I can see already that as of yet I am not very good at what I am planning to do in the future. But instead of letting that stop me, I will go on with it anyway, muddling through and doing my best until, hopefully, I will be good enough to actually make a living off it. And it was very nice to hear that I am not alone in this position.
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On another note: Ira Glass – who is this guy? I never heard of him before, but after watching this video (and the other 3 parts of this talk) I think he’s adorable. Not to mention funny.
And because of that I was curious enough to check out the website of his show “This American Life“, where I found that you can actually download whole episodes of the radio and tv show. Great. Now how am I supposed to get any work done in the next 2 weeks or so? *sigh*
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