Such a soulful articulation of the creative process from Ira Glass: Nobody tells beginners this, and I really wish somebody had told me. All of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. But for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, there’s a gap. What you’re making just isn’t so good. It's not that great. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good, but it's not quite that good. And your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase. At that point they quit. And the thing I would say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have that special thing they wanted it to have. The thing I would say to you is... everybody goes through that. If you’re going through it right now, or you’re just getting out of that phase, you've got to know that it’s totally normal. The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month, you know that you're going to finish one story. Because it’s only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. Eventually, the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. In my case, I took longer to figure out how to do this than anybody I’ve ever met. It takes a while. It's going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

I’ve also found myself more frequently asking, “Have you asked ChatGPT?” Note: It’s not, “Have you Googled it?”

“Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit.” — James Clear