I recently came across this guy named Ira Glass, from NPR. He talks about something called the taste gap. The idea is that any creative will want to make stuff that they like or have a passion for. Their taste for what they want to achieve, is already there, and well developed. You know what you want to make. You know how you want it to look or feel. Your head is already there. But there’s a gap between that final product and where you are at the moment. You notice this when you try and make something that captures what’s in your head but fail to do so. Sometimes miserably. Your skill level, unfortunately, isn’t well developed. It isn’t there yet. That is the gap. It’s when you make something that you visibly cringe at when you watch, read or consume. And it is this point where most people quit. Its not what you want to make, so why even try. By quitting so soon into the game, most people never get the chance to fill the gap. They never get to cross it to the other side. And so the question is, how do you bridge the gap? How do you get to making the stuff you want to make? According to Ira, you get there by filling the gap with as much work as possible.
Just Make Stuff
If you think of the gap as a whole separating one side from the other, the aim is to fill that hole with as much stuff as possible. Think of it as a landfill, and your filling it up with stuff, until you can easily get across it without getting stuck. What that means is that you need to put out stuff that’s mediocre, disappointing, and bad. Its doing this over and over again, until you get good. Take any YouTube channel you watch frequently. Go to the earliest videos on the channel. Try and watch them without cringing. Look at how far back those videos were. Look at a couple and judge them by where they are today. Look at how many videos they’ve put out. That’s how far that Youtuber you like has come. They didn’t magically make it there. They had an idea of where they were going, but no idea of how to get there. But they put out content anyways, over and over again. They filled the gap with as much work as possible. Only by doing that did they find out what works and what doesn’t. Only by going through the mud did they find out what they liked. It is how they created their niche.
Time Waits For No Man
Its going to take some time to fill in that gap. For some people, less time, for some a lot more than average. But with every piece of content you put out there, you will get better. Little by little. It comes back to the most powerful tool for an investor, and anyone at all really. Time. The more time you dedicate to the careful execution of a craft, the better you get at it. Its a matter of how much output you are producing per unit time. This can be something like making something every day, every week, every month. This allows you to get in your 10,000 hours quickly. Its creating a deadline for working on something and putting it out there. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough - it achieves its bare minimum goal. A lot of us will want to wait until we achieve perfection to share something. Thing is, by the time you get there, it might be too late. There might be someone else doing the same thing. And this is the mental model I’m using with this blog (I just recently started calling it a blog - I was too scared to before).
Low Quality, Rambly, Incoherent
So what does all the above mean for me? A lot of what I’m writing about is still gibberish to me. I don’t fully grasp the concepts discussed in these articles. But I do understand just enough to talk about them with some competence. There are going to be massive inaccuracies in these articles in just a few years. I am going to grossly miscalculate on some of the companies I cover here, meaning some of those are not going to pay off at all. That’s because in the grand scheme of things, its still pretty early for me. There’s a lot I’m still yet to learn. I’m only just developing a philosophy. But that philosophy is not constant, and will change when it needs to. I’m also still developing a voice, a way to convey ideas to you. You’ll notice that a lot of the blog so far has been rambly and not at all cohesive. That’s because I’m not entirely sure how to convey what I know - partly because I know too little at the moment. I also tend to go off on random tangents a lot. I’m writing exactly what I’m thinking, hence this issue. I also have no idea that any of this is interesting to the people reading. It would be a lot more interesting if I was more experimental with my strategies and thoughts. But I’m not trying to go broke to entertain you, as much as that would draw you in. I’m conservative, which just basically means boring to the vast majority of people.
But…
But as the jogger said to Bojack, “It gets easier, you just have to do it every day. But it does get easier”. The more I understand, the better I can convey this knowledge back to you. At least that’s the hope. I’ll keep putting out stuff that I come across, stuff that I learn. I’ll put it out if its substandard, cringy. It goes out. Besides, I paid fourteen thousand shillings for this blog. I’m going to use it as much as I can for the time being. And hopefully I’ll get better every time I do it. Just like that Youtuber you like, I’m hoping these early posts will turn out cringy in 5 years or so. If they aren’t, then I haven’t grown. And with every article I put out there, I’ll be filling in the gap, closing it little by little until I can safely cross to the other side. I started this blog on a whim. And since I started it, I’ve been asked a couple of times how its doing. Do people even read this stuff? And my answer has been the same so far. I don’t think anyone cares at the moment. I’m just trying o better my thinking and analysis skills. And that’ll take time. It’ll take time for anyone to start following this stuff on a regular basis. I don’t blame you. I have no idea what I’m doing either. But I’m willing to try. I’m willing to try.