"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. It has potential. But your taste -- your taste 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. Our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you’re just getting started or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s 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 project. 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. It’s gonna take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

"Creativity is practice. It’s repetition plus reinvention over time. You do a thing, then you make it better the next time, and you do this over the long arc of time. That’s the truth about creative careers and projects. The job isn’t to “be creative.” The job is to create."

"In 2017, at SXSW, Ira Glass summarized this truth more succinctly than his now-famous quote when he said, “Don’t wait. Just make the thing. Make a version, and then make it better and then make it better.”"

"Given the truth about creativity, summarized by Ira Glass, I believe anyone can make what matters. We are all capable of creating meaningful things. (This is my version of Ratatouille’s “anyone can cook” or Bob Ross’s “anyone can paint.” Anyone can create!)"

"To make what matters, we can close the gap between what our taste, our intuition, and our ambitions are urging us to create … and what our skills are capable of producing. The way to close that gap is create a volume of work. Thus, the most important project and indeed the only real project is our body of work."