“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 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 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

I'm reminded of this lesson often with children around. Here is how it usually goes:

-"I'm going to draw a castle/mermaid/tree/airplane/etc" and child sits down intently with paper and crayons, tongue protruding ever so slightly while working away frantically.
- 5 or 10 minutes later the child puts down the pencil and sits back to survey their work.
- at this point, you can see it all over their face; that look of "what the fuck is this??!! I didn't draw this!!! Where's my castle/mermaid/tree/airplane/etc??!!!"
- cue the wailing, crayon throwing, paper crumpling and writhing on the floor.

We used to jokingly refer to this as "The Phantom Hand" and wait out these bursts of artistic agony as patiently as we could while sipping our coffee. But I distinctly remember when I gave up on closing the gap in my early 20's, shortly after we closed our retail store. I took it hard, as a sure sign from the universe that I simply didn't have "it" and that the end of my artistic vision was a door shutting firmly. That darn Phantom Hand was all over my photography, my writing, my painting. And so I gave up. I decided that I was better off as an appreciator rather than a maker. That I would leave those loftier pursuits to people who had the innate ability to know what ISO setting to use, to those who could write words that were moving and soulful, hilarious and profound.

All well and good, being an appreciator, but here's the thing; if you are a born maker or creator you really have little control over that need to make something, to create something from a few scraps of paper or loose words floating around in your brain or pieces of wood scattered around on the garage floor. You cannot help it. Fighting against that need will only leave you unfulfilled in so many other aspects of your life because spending many of your hours each day in the creative process is the only food your soul knows how to metabolize. And coming to this realization made me see that the only difference between them and me was that they had closed the gap. They had repeated and tried and failed enough to reduce the difference between what lives in the mind and what is held in the hand.

So I forced myself to create some truly awful things, to put it out there no matter what the end result. To look at the individual stitches and appreciate the warmth the scarf rather than the wonky, uneven edges. I took classes and watched videos and asked questions like a 4-year-old on Red Bull. Slowly things have started to change but I know I'll be closing the gap and swatting away that damn Phantom Hand the rest of my life.

I read this quote to my oldest son occasionally, when I see the pain of the awful final product overriding the desire to make something and I think he gets it. Another helpful thing is that whenever the boys are getting ready to try a new skill, such as skiing, perfecting a corner kick, chopping an onion, making a bracelet or buckling a seat belt we tell them that they should plan on doing it 50 times before they can expect any kind of proficiency. You can be frustrated and declare your sucki-ness on attempt 51.

If you need a bit more of a nudge, this is a great entry from Cheryl Strayed's Dear Sugar column.