Anna Akana talks about why good creative work takes years of practice and persistence. She quotes Ira Glass on the gap between taste and skill, and explains how tools like Squarespace help you share your work while you're still learning.
Hey guys, so I'm very excited to pair up with Squarespace for today's video. As you know, we have made beautiful ads together. Thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's ad. I'd like to say thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's ad. I'd like to thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's ad. I'd like to thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's ad. And today I really want to emphasize one of their core values that really resonates in my life. Good work takes time. Ultimately, when you start in a creative field, everything that you make when you first start out just kinda sucks, and it's really easy to get discouraged. Ahhh! Oh God, my couch. It's so easy to think like, oh, I'm never gonna be good at this, and to just give up. But you have to remind yourself that creating anything worthwhile takes hours invested, lots of failures, and analyzing those failures so that you know how to do better next time. I approach everything in my life From this mindset. A fun example is I used to make music about like 5, 7 years ago, and it was really awful. Thank you, internet, for letting me know. Instead of singing, I was actually just straight-up screaming. Ahhh! And unfortunately, I didn't really want to make screamo music, but this was an area of my life that was really important to me. So I decided to enroll in vocal lessons and give myself 5 to 10 years to really master the craft. And I know that sounds hella extra, but you do this so you can put yourself in a mindset to really embrace the process. And that way, when you improve sooner than a decade, you're pleasantly surprised. So please, when you engage in anything, give yourself so much time to get good. Ira Glass has this wonderful quote about the creative process that really inspired me years ago, and it goes: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good. It has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you're just starting out or you're still in this phase, you've got to know that it's normal. And the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It's only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take a while. You just gotta fight your way through. And I can't emphasize this enough: you don't pick up a basketball and expect to be amazing at your first game, or walk into a classroom and just think knowledge is gonna fall into your lap. Anything worthwhile is gonna take you a lot of time, so give yourself the space to have that time. Thank you so much to Squarespace for having me on. By creating a Squarespace website, you can track your progress, put yourself out there, set goals, and get some feedback, and just keep going. keep working at it. Just think, in a year, it'll be amazing how far you've come. I'm Anna Akana. Stay awesome, Gotham. Stay awesome, Gotham.
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