Oh look what someone went and did. Here’s Ira Glass’ amazing words on the gap between your killer taste and your work in sleek graphic poster form.

That’s something good to bash your head against on the studio wall, in the early hours, when it all seems too difficult.

Kudos to young designer Sawyer Hollenshead for taking the time to make this.

You can watch Ira’s related interview here.

It’s one of the most reassuring expressions of creative frustration I’ve ever heard and I just keep going back and back and back to it as I try to narrow that gap.

“You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

‘Reality testing’, now there is a phrase I like. On a day when I am consumed by the enormous gulf between my vision for Creative Data and where it is currently at, these words from Mastin Kipp’s The Daily Love are very comforting or, rather better, bolstering.

I am totally loving The Daily Love’s oh-so-wise newsletters. Every day I find in there a little something that’s useful, and today’s message of Stop talking, Start doing just nails it for me. It also takes me back to the excellent talk by Ira Glass on the distance between your “killer taste” and the “work that falls short”.

Mastin continues…

“As we go through this process, it can be scary because we risk the outcome of our dreams and visions not working or coming true. But we cannot let that fear stop us. If we wish to live our lives as fulfilled people, we must take as much action as we do seeing our visions. We must put ourselves out there and risk rejection, but not take it personally. Instead we see “rejection”, “failure” and “naysayers” just as part of us gathering more information about what we want to create. Think of it as reality testing our ideas.”

The key phrase for me here is:

“If we wish to live our lives as fulfilled people, we must take as much action as we do seeing our visions.”

When the going gets tough and I really wonder why I don’t just work a regular nine to five, with weekends off, I have to look at this and remember why I chose this path. I think the @DoLectures and @GoodForNothing crews know what I am talking about.

Just gotta keep going… as Ira says, “it’s only by going through a volume of work that you are going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you are making will be as good as your ambitions.”

“I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal,
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance though death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that.”

Rumi

As always Akram Khan’s incredible work transported and inspired this evening - more intensely than ever, in fact. Vertical Road is powerfully gripping. Full of explosive beats, astonishing spiritual references, gasp inducing athletic feats and visceral vibrating forms. But the overwhelming feeling I have when ever I walk out of an Akram Khan performance is that…

I just want to be better at what I do.

That kind of brilliance focuses the mind and sharpens the ambition. Time to work harder on narrowing that gap between my “killer taste” and the work that ‘falls short”.

Thanks to Akram for showing me what’s possible.

The great Ira Glass talking about the gap between “killer taste” and work that “falls short”. I feel acutely the distance between the two on a daily basis. Thanks to the amazing Jonathan Harris for pointing me in Ira’s direction.