A Christmas Miracle

I received the greatest gift of all

My wife got me a nifty pizza dough scraper for Christmas but I received my best present late on Boxing Day, when my 13-year-old daughter leaned in while I was brushing my teeth and said “Dad, I don’t understand this graph. Could you please explain it to me?”

The gift of being asked to help. Asked to help interpret a graph! I felt like this was the reason I’d had children in the first place. I had expected parenthood to be equal parts dispensing advice and sharing hard-earned knowledge. Instead it is mostly shouting at people to be nice to each other, and sweeping the floor under the kitchen stools Nowadays if I want to hand out advice to somebody against their will I just write a substack.

Anyway the graph Hazel was looking at was from the book she’s reading, Atomic Habits. Apparently, it’s reached such huge sales volumes that most of you will already have it in your bookshelf, but in case your poor reading habits have prevented you even making a start on fixing them, I include the graph in question:

If you have trouble understanding this I’ll let you ask your own dad for help. But I include it because it reminded me of another great idea I heard this year (I think from Cal Newport’s Deep Questions podcast, but I’m willing to be corrected).

[Thank you Scott Sutherland who replied to me on email. It wasn’t Cal Newport it was Ira Glass. The full quote as supplied by Scott is at the bottom of this post*. Thank you again!]

The idea is that when you first begin a creative pursuit, your taste exceeds your talent. You take up painting because you love the Old Masters, but your own pictures are so much worse than Michelangelo’s that you immediately get dispirited. You pick up a guitar because you’re obsessed with Jimi Hendrix, but you don’t even sound like you’re playing the same instrument as him.

I first tried stand up comedy because I idolised Garry Shandling, but my best joke wasn’t as good as his worst one. I stuck with it but I had many years of wondering “what is the point?” If I couldn’t even make myself laugh, surely I’d chosen the wrong job.

My tastes didn’t match my talent. I knew what great comedy was but I couldn’t create it myself. It was frustrating - almost enough to chuck the whole thing in. I wish I’d had someone there to explain to me that I’d have to go through the long, hard part in order to start having the breakthroughs I wanted.

Has the same been true for you? When you started writing poetry, or surfing, or being a chef, did you go through those months/years of thinking you were wasting your time? Did you give it up or stick with it and, either way, did you regret it?

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*"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