Posts tagged #taste
Cultivate the taste gap. The novel I’m currently reading reminded me of this useful concept for creatives called “the taste gap.” It’s the idea is that there’s a difference between what you want to create and what you are able to create. It’s the reason why a lot of creative projects stall and never get made. Most people give up trying when they see how vast and disappointing and insurmountable the gap seems.
All of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t good. But your taste is still killer. And because of your taste, you can tell what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point quit.
Glass’s advice? Do a huge volume of work. Keep practicing, and your abilities will start to catch up to your taste.
I like Mandy Brown’s twist on this: that practice increases your competence which in turn elevates your taste. Therefore, making things cultivates rather than closes the taste gap–and that’s where the joy of making stuff is.
As you build your craft, whether it’s writing or radio or glass blowing or leading a team, you develop ever more ideas about what’s possible in your work. As your skill grows, so too do your ambitions, such that your taste always and forever outstrips your abilities. For every increment of improvement, you extend your desires out that much further. This is not to say you will never be satisfied with your work—although, that is a not uncommon scenario, and not necessarily as dreary as it sounds. But rather that as you become more capable, you are wont to find as much joy and satisfaction in the process of developing your skill as in the outcomes of it.
The work of creativity, at the end of the day, is the work of creativity—not what you create, but who you become in the act of creation.
Emphasis mine. Who do you become in the act of creation? More you. A more true you.