Or so I gleaned from this video with Ira Glass, in which he reinforces the old Thomas Edison idea that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Glass’s thesis is that if you know your field, and you have the eye to recognize that your work is not as good as it could be, then what is holding you back from greatness is not your lack of taste, it is lack of practice. I personally find this notion very reassuring, because lack of practice is something you can easily remedy with something like a Thing-A-Day project. Acquiring taste, on the other hand (as the judges on Project Runway will tell you) is much more elusive.
p.s. I am still making a thing-a-day, but I have had to revert back to my original rules.
via Craftzine
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Thanks for bringing this to the forefront. So interesting to have someone (such as Ira Glass) convey this topic in such a straight-forward, no-nonsense delivery.
Keep up the great work Biz Miss.
Thank you so much for posting this. Ira explains it so well. It’s tough when you consider yourself to be a borderline snob in the realms of art, writing, movies, whatever, but you know that the work you actually produce is not living up to your own standards of greatness. And he reinforces the reason I started my blog – to hold myself accountable to something in the hopes that I would create massive amounts of art!