Welcome to Mental Garden, a newsletter about creativity, focus, and systems for writing and building projects on the internet. To explore the full library, go here.
The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.
🏷️ Categories: Life lessons, Creativity, Motivation.
Ira Glass is one of the most influential radio hosts in the United States in recent decades.
He is best known as the host and producer of This American Life, one of the most influential radio and podcast programs. Although his career did not start with prestige or clarity—quite the opposite—he began in 1978, at age 19, as an intern at NPR, and spent the next 17 years working in nearly every radio production role before launching This American Life in 1995 (Fisher, 1999).
That makes what came next particularly interesting.
The most valuable part of his story is not the success itself, but what he understood during the years when he still hadn’t achieved it. In a reflection that would later become famous, Ira Glass explained that almost no one warns beginners about a serious problem.
Many artists start creating for pleasure, because they have good taste.
They can recognize and appreciate good art; they know what makes a work of art “good.” But for a long time, their beginner-level skills are not yet at the level of that standard they can already perceive and aspire to. It is uncomfortable, because they can clearly see that what they make does not live up to what they imagine or hope to achieve.
That disappointment, Ira Glass said, is what makes many people quit (and he almost did himself).
That is the importance of this story.
The same artistic sensitivity that led you from consuming art to creating it can become the very reason you want to quit if you don’t manage it. For Ira Glass, the key is to stop judging your work and focus on consistently producing long enough for your skills to catch up with your ambitions.
The artist’s job is to create, not to judge.
.jpg){kind=link}
Don’t judge yourself while you work
For two years, I have been publishing articles every two days on Jardín Mental.
Some days, the words come easily—that’s true. Other days, writing a single sentence is painful—that’s also true. And there have been many moments when I have felt exactly what Ira Glass was talking about, I assure you.
“I thought this was a good article. Why does it seem like no one is interested…?”
Or, conversely, writing something I felt was inadequate and seeing it become one of the most-read texts. Whatever the final outcome, I have learned one thing: we are terrible at judging our own work.
Ira Glass insists on this.
Not only are you a poor judge of your work while you are in the process, but that is also not your job. It is not your role to spend every minute deciding how valuable what you are doing is. It is not your role to constantly compare it to others’ work. It is not your role to anticipate the final result and decide whether it will be appreciated, useful, or important. And, certainly, it is not your role to tell yourself “no” before you have even finished your work.
Instead, your responsibility is to create.
There are people in almost every profession who turn each day into a work of art through the way they practice their craft. In that sense, almost everyone is an artist in some way or another. And yes, every artist judges their work—it’s natural—but don’t let that judgment stop you from doing your job.
Artists create, even when it is not easy.
Keep your eyes on your own page
When I started training calisthenics, a friend who is much better than me once told me something I still remember and apply: “Learn the technique from the best. Do the exercises as well as they do, but don’t do their same workouts.”
He wanted to prevent me from rushing ahead, to prevent injuries.
However, within that sentence there was a deeper idea for life. It doesn’t matter how good others around you are. You must focus on your own level and your own practice. That is your task. You won’t get there faster just by trying to rush.
It doesn’t matter what you dedicate your days to.
Every morning you return to your task. You can learn from those ahead of you, but you cannot skip the fundamentals that belong to you. All great artists painted doodles. All great singers went out of tune. All great writers have notebooks full of drafts and crossed-out lines. Your job is to do the daily work, not to judge it at every step. Being mediocre is part of the process.
We need to normalize being bad.
Only then can you become good at something.
This is the video of Ira Glass talking about self-criticism and the ambition to create.
Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:
The Helsinki bus theory: The mistake that kills most creative careers
Everything in its time: Are you patient enough to see results?
✍️ Your turn: How many times have you stopped creating something because it didn’t match what you imagined? I used to have tons of half-finished drafts I would reject before even completing them, but that’s over now.
💭 Quote of the day: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first.” — G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World
See you next time! 👋
I not only enjoy your articles about staying the course by working toward perfecting your craft, I also NEED them to boot me in the belle derriere to keep going. Thank you again for a good kick, Alvaro.