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Lest We Forget
“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
― Ira Glass
The End of the Road
Like all entitled, white, recently graduated 20-somethings, I was perfectly happy to delay figuring out where my life was going for as long as humanly possible, convinced that if I were to actually try for a few minutes, jobs would rain down like manna from heaven.
Turns out that I was wrong. They don’t.
30 seconds after signing the “I’d like to go home now” documents, watching the ink dry, it began to occur to me that 3 years living in the most isolated, god-forsaken (albeit gorgeous and pretty awesome) chunk of land in all of Japan had done a pretty poor job of preparing me to do anything except chat up toothless old men and get repeatedly punched in the dick by excited 6-year-olds. While I’m I’m sure there is a career in there somewhere, possible connected to a very specific fetish found only in Japan, It’s not exactly how I imagined making my rice money.
It turns out that no matter what you do, you’re probably going to have to work yourself into an emaciated heap of bones to get it. There is, in the words of the crotchety Economics saints of yesteryear, no such thing as a free lunch. So if I’m going to have to work hard as balls at it anyway, I sure as shit am going to do something I love.
My name is Adam Golder. And I’m a writer.
Even if it kills me.