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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 that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its 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 is 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 awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

- Ira Glass

5 comments

I am a handyman and have a lot of weird, specific physical skills. Like being able to paint around an electrical outlet, caulking, leveling concrete, juggling, cartwheels, tying cherry stems in my mouth, etc. The life of an embodied worker.

When I am teaching anyone any of these skills, the first thing I say is “are you ready to be bad at this for a long time?” Sometimes it catches people off guard. On the other hand, if someone says “yes” then I know that they are going to be a good learner.

Heh. I’m not in the trades, but ~15 years ago I decided to rock/tape/mud ~800sqft of my house myself… to top it off, my lighting design included wall grazing lights and a satin sheen finish and another wall that gets hit lengthwise for 10’ at sunset. That was a long, long period that tested my sanity and marriage. It was probably good enough after first pass, but my standards were far beyond unreasonable and I had to live with results.

I eventually got rather good, albeit slow, and now can easily finish a wall where you can’t find butt or tapered seams with a flashlight, with minimal sanding. It took many hundreds of hours over the years, and a clear idea of what the bar was, for me to get there. The results still bring me joy, but more also the intuition built up around working with mud translated to a quick ramp up for more ambitious projects with stucco and concrete.

The trick with drywall is to avoid all the extra effort. Your drive for the perfect surface limited your options when, at the beginning you had a universe of potential outcomes. You chose for it to become monotonically flat.

When my mom was in her late 60's having never done any work with drywall or mud, taping, floating, etc and attempting to make lemonade out of a situation where every room in the house was being sheetrocked because Dad was actively using some of his many skills to convert their house into a home, she became creative and produced a collection of decorative walls that anyone could admire.

There are rag-rolled walls with layers of colors over imperfect textures. There are walls painted a neutral background color and then combed with spectacular streaks. Some rooms are wavy and others are vertical lines. She layered colors and textures because the drywall, after all the work was done had textural flaws and places where use of a single color would make all the imperfections pop like Shiprock from the New Mexico plain. It was hard making 1/4" (6.3mm) drywall hide all the changes to the structure and the shiplap that had happened in the 80 years (80 years) since the house was built.

My favorite walls are in a hallway with nearly 10' (~3m) ceilings. She used a variable depth texture, thicker than anywhere else in the house and knocked relatively flat though with plenty of knife swirls randomly distributed. In the heavy texture she used a leaf print to impress hundreds of oak leaves from floor to ceiling in random orientations as if they are all falling. The colors are autumn colors with a light base and darker accents that create additional shadowing. It really is beautiful and is quite original.

Every time I walk that hallway I hear:

The leaves are falling all around, time I was on my way.

Thanks to you I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.

But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.

With the original oak hardwood floor painted a nice checkerboard pattern and the trim all Dad's handiwork it is really great.

Flat surfaces seem like such a modern obsession. I feel the attraction, but defiantly try to oppose the gravity.

At least you limited yourself to human scale hand-y work.

An engineer type can go down some dark yak holes trying to find solutions to achieve inhuman flatness

Yet the same skill that leads to perfect flatness then also leads to being able to make something look organic and natural, should they so wish.

It's about honing ability and competence.

The taste for perfect imperfection.

I only just learnt about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

Perhaps "artisinal" encompasses the idea?

Ira Glass is imperfect perfectionism.

I don't mind the old walls in my house with their lumps and bumps, but I do mind the half assed drywall job I hired out with poorly sanded joints, oversized electrical cutouts and other flaws.

Id love to develop the skill for drywall, but then amount of mess and dust it creates is too much for me and my SO. Even if I did it off site, taking a shower and changing clothes every time is a hassle.

Is it really more of a hassle than going exercising or anything else with special gear? Hiking / skiing / swimming?

Yes. The fine dust gets everywhere. Imagine rolling around in the sand at the beach, but 10x worse. Skiing, what, you turn the corner of the mountain and there's a snow maker running full bore at you so you're a little bit cold but then the snow melts into water when you do get inside. You're all suited up but it's okay because it's cold outside. You could wear a tyvek suit to do drywall, but then you're sweating too much to do the job.

I had an electrician come out, it was a younger guy who owned the business and his crew.

And they had these minor-superhero things they could do.

Like he could hammer around a corner. You would think it wasn't a big deal, but he could put wire staples places where a beginner or a fancy staple gun couldn't reach.

I'm an industrial electrician. I'm also skinny; people often undrestimate me. Once I had two non-electrician coworkers helping me pull some large wire and make up splices in a trough. One beefy guy was struggling with the wire, so I grabbed it, twisted it around into place. The other guy says, surprised, "You're stronger than you look." I just said, "Sure".

Because of the way the strands are laid, wire has a direction and way it "wants" to go. I'd been an electrician twenty years by that point and knew how to work it. Not strength. Not that I said any of that.

I think some call that “old man strength”.

Might not be as strong or fast as he used to be, but knows how to do it smartly.

Sometimes the problem truly requires strength and brute force, but not usually.

Even something like taking up concrete. It seems straight forward but you can waste a lot of energy hitting the wrong places.

> Might not be as strong or fast [..] knows how to do it smartly.

Friend of mine worked in Prisons for a while, and has a way of telling the difference between people with a lot of muscle and people who know how leverage their musculature to high effect.

Also using all your motor units to their full capacity (the "invisible" strength) helps. Which usually requires at least some training.

I think it might be like "mechanics feel" they talked about directly in the book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

You get enough experience and you can turn a bolt or screw and tighten it to stretch a little.

Not too little (doesn't hold parts together and/or can come loose).

Not too much (uneven tightening or snap/strip something).

Just right (torque wrenches make this precise).

Has this conversation with a friend the other day when an electrical crew came to our place. We couldn't wrap our heads around the way they were able to finish so quickly and efficiently, when for us it would have probably taken days. It's definitely not an easy skill

> “are you ready to be bad at this for a long time?”

Oh, I love this so much. It communicates so many important things in one go.

My kids must be absolutely sick of me saying in a dozen different ways "you just have to do it a lot."

This also reminds me of how I've often responded when people ask me about learning to code. I ask them if they're ok with sitting in front of a computer for many hours.

It sounds obvious, but most people (in my experience) simply aren't ok with that, and hadn't considered it.

> ...when people ask me about learning to code. I ask them if they're ok with sitting in front of a computer for many hours.

I wonder if this puts people off who shouldn't be put off.

I certainly don't think I'd want that for myself if asked. But coding doesn't feel like that. Sure, I sit in front of a computer for hours, but productive sessions generally involve losing track of time and realising you've been sat there for hours

During the pandemic I decided (for no particular reason) to learn how to do a handstand. A proper full straight up one. These are much harder to do then they appear especially as an adult. They aren't physically difficult in terms of strength, its just you have so little contact area to correct with your hands and your brain does not know how to deal with this. It was a long time of doing it badly before it slowly clicked in.

I'm not a handyman, but I am a man who happens to be handy.

I have done quite a bit of painting and caulking for a guy who's not in the profession. I despise both with a passion, though, especially caulking, and I have never once been satisfied with a single paint or caulk job I've done. I feel like I'm the embodiment of "be bad at this for a long time," although I'm objectively probably halfway decent at it.

That is to say I think Ira Glass' quote of "You've just gotta fight your way through" to get where you want to be seems especially meaningful in the context of something like painting, where most everyone _can_ do it (or writing / storytelling in Ira's case), but very few are actually good at it.

You need a silicone caulking tool, and a video. I have spent many years caulking like a fool listening to other fools who spray water and use their thumbs. Don't. Use the tool. Use the kind with a little oval tip usually (I mean, there are exceptions with harder caulks but for softer e.g bathroom caulks this is more superior.)

There's one UK guy on YouTube that convinced me of the evils of water/iso sprays and the beauty of the proper silicone caulking tool.

The little wedge shaped caulking tools btw are not enough, as you need some stick to it so you can get around certain angles/items.

I don't know if it's specifically UK terminology, but here we don't call bathroom silicone "caulk" - we use that term for decorators caulk, which is much more sticky; so needs to be treated differently to silicone. Definitely true that the little tools are amazing for bathroom silicone, not sure what you do with the other stuff

"Everything's easy, when you know how to do it; it's that learning curve..."--me.

Out of curiosity, what brings you to Hacker News?

I programmed for 15 years and I like watching the dumpster fire. This is one of the better managed forums on the internet, so even though I don’t do that job anymore it’s nice to check in.

(there's an email on my profile if you'd be open to chatting about it sometime. I only ask because I'm curious about making a similar transition)

> But there is this gap... it’s just not that good.... But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

That is, verifying a solution is much easier than finding it!

P != NP

>And your taste is why your work disappoints you. [...] We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.

I think most of us have experienced this. I consider myself an above-average writer and I absolutely hate everything I write.

But the problem, for me anyway, is that it's exceedingly difficult to know what to work on next in order to improve. In that regard writing is entirely unlike a lot of sports.

My throws are bad? Better throw 100 passes a day, every day, until my muscle memory is there. I'm getting beat deep? Better work on my fitness. Maybe I'll never get to where I want to be, but at least I know why.

But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.

> But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.

In the beginning it's great to practice your art by yourself with lots of safety, but sooner or later you're gonna want to to ask the public/community at large what they think of what you do, so you can get external feedback from people other's who love the same thing. I think this is probably the only way to actually get better, you need to connect with other people around it, and get their point of view. I've found this true for any creative endeavor I've tried to get better at.

Receiving criticism is probably as hard to get good at as giving criticism, so don't let the harsher stuff get into your skin as some people aren't so good at giving criticism, but you'll find lots of other useful advice that you'll agree with, and find directly actionable :)

The thoughts you are having about this show me that you are at a local maximum, but you will find your way out if you keep trying everything. There is no single thing that will help. Read novels, copy them word by word, translate them, write short stories, dissect stories, stop movies halfway and ask yourself how you would continue them. Read a ton of writing advice, try them out but don’t take it as gospel.

Even if you don’t improve for 100 days straight, small successes accumulate. In a decade you will have transformed yourself.

There is just no way you won’t improve significantly if you keep trying new things and bring yourself to fail ever day.

What helped me was the saying “your first million words are gonna be shit”. I still distinctly remember, four or five years into writing every day, when things finally clicked, my voice came through, and my sentences became fun. It is delayed gratification to the max.

> There is just no way you won’t improve significantly if you keep trying new things and bring yourself to fail ever day

Thank you for this.

one concrete thing I can name is "widening" your view on writing. force different styles upon yourself, different constraints. the results will keep being shit for a while, but at least it will be very fun to tonally cosplay Shakespear before the mirror! you won't notice how time will pass :)

listening to narrations of vast variety of poetry and narrating something yourself will help you develop your specific voice and read with more intent.

you may not even need the "science of writing" this article describes. let yourself just... be with text.

People here are saying you must write a lot to get good. Makes sense. But what about also reading a lot to learn from masters?

How do LLMs do it? They don't learn by writing a lot they learn by reading a lot.

> How do LLMs do it? They don't learn by writing a lot they learn by reading a lot.

Literally they learn by both, training process is filled with "exercises" for the weights to be shaped by, not just "seeing" tokens :) At least the typical LLM that outputs tokens have to actually "practice" doing so.

True. Just saying we learn not only by lots of trial and error, but also by trying to imitate others.

The software version of this (pre-LLM!) was to write tons of software till the patterns just click. I don’t see that continuing though.

Does anyone truly think we’ll have another generation of nerds hacking away for hours by hand to hone their trade? Or will it turn into a craft like woodworking?

I don’t see how “artisanal” software would make sense since what matters is the end result.

One of the worst parts of software is that you develop this deep expertise in something that has less to show for it to people than a guy dicking around on a guitar or someone who made a stool after 40 hours of experience.

People aren’t decompiling their iPhone apps to admire your handiwork and evaluate how thoughtfully you modeled the domain.

Will artisanal human-driven taxi drivers exist in the future? No, Waymo is even more expensive yet people prefer it. The human aspect turns out to be a liability and less of a human expression people would go out of their way to experience.

Why not? People have lots of hobbies.

If I'm being honest, software was a hobby before it was a profession. I just thought computers were fun from about age 10 or so. In college I wanted to study Civil engineering, but shifted to Computer engineering and then it turned out the world wanted software so bad they'd let me do whatever I wanted as long as I gave them a little software along the way.

I see my sons tinkering with software now in the same way I did. They want to play games and make games and build their own tools. I don't know whether they'll wind up building software as a profession, but I'm sure they'll have the base skills needed to.

> your taste is why your work disappoints you.

Damn, on point. So hard to go over that hump but so worth it, every time, in retrospect.