Ira Glass on the secret of success | Hacker News Reader

Ira Glass on the secret of success

brainpickings.org

103 pointsColinWright13 comments

I don't recommend this over the version that's been on YouTube for a long time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY

The kinetic typography gives me a headache, possibly because nobody should be forced to read text that is jiggling around at Ira Glass's speaking speed. It is also redundant, obviously. Ira Glass is one of the world's most famous narrators; we can understand him just fine.

It's also necessarily abridged, and while I agree that they captured some of the best sentences in the clip, there's more to a work of art than just its topic sentence. (Woody Allen: "I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.") In this case, it's a shame to leave out the part where Glass pulls out a tape of his younger self to show how awful his work used to be.

I went to design school at one of the most well renown schools of Design in the country. We learned a lot in a very compressed amount of time, and I was consistently impressed with the raw intelligence of my colleagues.

But the single thing that I noticed differentiated people who were break-out "all stars" were people who weren't afraid to fail and kept pushing boundaries week after week of crits (critiques). Learning how to give and take critique is an essential part of any sort of creative process, but the prerequisite to evaluation and refinement is the act of raw creation.

A favorite story of mine from a product design professor:

An elementary school pottery class was split into two groups. The first group was told that they'd be graded on the volume of the ceramic pots they created. The second group was told they'd be graded on the sheer aesthetic qualities of only one ceramic pot throughout the course of the semester.

Semester after semester, the 1st group (graded on volume) would inevitably have the most aesthetically pleasing ceramic pot in the group.

Iterating and more importantly, having the right mindset to learn from those iterations is pivotal to succeeding.

That is a great story. Reminds me of The Onion's method for coming up with headlines- they just make an enormous amount and filter until they have the best.

> Iterating and more importantly, having the right mindset to learn from those iterations is pivotal to succeeding.

That's exactly the approach taken at Pixar, and, at least in my mind, one of the more significant reasons they've been so successful.

Comedian Steve Martin has great insight in his auto-biography. I can't find my copy or an excerpt, but it's something to this effect:

>"If you don’t saturate your life in a single quest, you’ll dilute your focus to a point where becoming outstanding becomes out of reach."

He emphasizes dedication and tenacity, which lends a lot more credit to his often quoted line:

>"Be so good they can't ignore you".

The other takeaway I like from Steve Martin is the idea that it's easy to be great some of the time but hard to be good reliably. You can have 'on' nights, but it's handling your off nights that makes a professional.

dang, now I need to figure out where I read this.

edit: ah, found it.

>It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical. Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.

https://eebatou.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/5-creativity-tips-f...

Related - my friends were discussing the difference between professional bowlers and the really good amateur bowlers. One of theme bowled averaging 160s/170s. An amateur bowler can bowl in the 200s on their home lane but a professional bowler can bowl on the road, in any condition - any oiling pattern. Yes, they have many bowling balls (for the conditions) but the professionals can perform in any situation.

And, that is kind of the difference, between the rash of amateur coders and professional coders. Amateur coders (it is great that some of them have never code before) get a thrill from just writing something (the proverbial Hello, World or more) while professional coders can code in the context of a larger system and integrate that code. To code when the conditions aren't so great (e.g. deadlines, pressure, existing architecture).

His autobiography probably covers much of the same ground as this essay he wrote called "Being Funny": http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/funny-martin-2008...

Something I took away from that essay is that he performed over and over, night after night. And that's what it took to be competent, not good.

In my free time I produce electronic music. I was just browsing DJ Lucky Date's YouTube channel and thinking "man he has put in a lot time". In the last six months or so he has blown up, but the work is there for all to see.

Edit: the link for those interested http://www.youtube.com/user/luckydatevideos

It's hard to agree with this as vigorously as I want. Every year I look back at where I was the year before and realize I was terrible back then, and when I look back at today in twelve months I'll realize that what I'm working on right now is not nearly as good as it will be then.

To anyone frustrated with their own mediocre work, keep going! You will be so much better next year.

This aligns with some feelings that have been brewing up inside of me for a while. I feel like any work, as long as it is real work (not just wasting time) is valuable...and the harder you try the better it gets, the hard you try the luckier you get...luck and good work is a good start to the combination required for success.

I dont think it matters if you're a writer, software developer, mechanic...anything...time makes you better and the key is to not give up when you dont see the light at the end of the tunnel...have a little faith that its just around the bend.

I try to watch this video about once a month. It never ceases to relevant to my life and work, I just wish I had seen it ten years ago when I was first starting.

Thanks for the reminder this month!

tl/dr "do a lot of work even as you might feel it's not up to your expectations but persevere and it'll get better it's normal".

I dunno, tl as in too long doesn't feel appropriate here, I was surprised by the lack of content actually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com