Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming.
They'd rather show the highlight of what they've become.

Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of the popular National Public Radio show, This American Life.

Each week, This American Life is broadcast to more than 1.7 million listeners across 500 different radio stations. For Glass, who is featured in almost every episode, the show has led to a wide range of opportunities including book deals, feature films, and appearances on popular television shows.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way.

Glass started out at NPR as a 19-year-old intern. The next decade was filled with a lot of hard work and very little payoff as he worked as a reporter.

Fifteen years into his career, Glass finally began co-hosting his first show, which was called The Wild Room. The show was his idea, but Glass would later describe it by saying “one show would be horrible and two shows would be decent.” The Wild Room aired during a particularly unpopular Friday evening slot and in Glass’ words “it deserved its time slot.”

After struggling through two years of The Wild Room, Glass finally pitched the idea for This American Life and received meager funding to get it started. Over 15 years and millions of listeners later, the rest is history.

But here’s the part that I find really interesting.

Check out how Ira Glass describes his long struggle to create something noteworthy:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

We all have reasons for being pulled to the things we love.

When he was just a 19-year-old intern, Ira Glass had a taste for journalism and storytelling. He knew what good journalism looked like when it was done well. But it took him 17 years of work before he could start to do it well himself. And, as he says above, that was frustrating.

I think you and I face a similar type of battle…

  • Spend a year or two in the gym and you’ll start to recognize good technique, even if your own could use some work. You’ll know a great clean and jerk when you see one, even if you personally struggle doing it perfectly yourself.
  • Start writing consistently and you’ll begin to take notice when you read great work. But good luck trying to produce your own brilliant words. In the beginning, it can be difficult just to get something on the page. And even when you can hammer out sentences, young writers quickly learn that all words aren’t created equal. Even with consistent writing each week, you can still feel like you fail to produce something of note.
  • Watch a dozen TED Talks and you’ll be able to point out what you like and don’t like about certain presenters, but jump up on stage yourself and the difficulty of captivating an audience — even for a minute or two — becomes quite apparent.

And so it goes for virtually any skill. There is always a gap between being an apprentice and being a craftsman. The apprentice has the taste, but not the skill. The craftsman has the taste and the skill.

It’s easier to recognize beauty than it is to create it. You’re good enough to know that what you’re doing isn’t good, but not good enough to produce something great. When you find yourself in this frustrating limbo, the challenge is to never forget what got you there in the first place. Remember that thing that got you into the game.

Your love. Your passion. Your taste. That’s the reason you’re here. You still belong, even if you don’t feel like it right now. Your taste can be killer even if your ability is questionable.

Commit to the process and you’ll become good enough, soon enough. Put in a volume of work. Close the gap.

Developing skills that are as good as your taste comes down to habits. The ability to “fight your way through” as Glass says, hinges on your consistency to show up and do the work. Can you build the habits required to make small improvements day after day?

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming.
They'd rather show the highlight of what they've become.

Read 1 Corinthians 15:10 NLT…

 But whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his special favor on me—and not without results. For I have worked harder than any of the other apostles; yet it was not I but God who was working through me by his grace.

People of faith — especially Christians — have an interesting habit of labeling things by their respective belief system of choice. We love to speak about a thing as if it is a much more special thing when stamped with our particular “brand” or nuance. Music takes on a different aura when called Christian music. So does television, movies, radio, politics. We even start calling things like character, love, hope, and faith itself as Christian — differentiated somehow by any other by a simple label.

Let’s consider this: if God is a God of truth, then all truth is of God. And if all truth is of God, then needing to specifically label a truth as Christian seems unnecessary and misaligned. If we have to label a truth or a thing as Christian, perhaps we should examine exactly why we feel the need to do so.

And why do we bring this up?

We read recently that someone had even differentiated between grit and Christian grit. One might speculate that Christian faith—and its inherent obligations of dependence—dilutes grit. Perhaps praying people work less hard because they seek divine help. But this conclusion doesn’t hold up. Faith doesn’t necessarily have to serve as lazy excuse and lack of grit.

One could also argue that faith—and its eternal hope—degrades earthly ambition. Maybe when people focus on heaven, they fail to make spectacular achievements on earth. But this hardly seems true. As C. S. Lewis noted in Mere Christianity, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.” As a person of faith, you shouldn’t be less gritty and less ambitious and less achieving than someone else. Our earthly work is consecrated to the highest good. We work as “for the Lord and not for men.”.

It does seem fair to identify an irreducible tension between grit and grace, which Paul’s own life bears out. Paul writes “But whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his special favor on me—and not without results. For I have worked harder than any of the other apostles; yet it was not I but God who was working through me by his grace.”

On the one hand, Paul defends his stewardship of God’s grace by his grit. And on the other, Paul acknowledges that even his grit has been empowered by grace. In other words, grace should make us gritty. And grittiness is one of grace’s good gifts.

Think about this:

What is the correct relationship between grace and grit? Is there a best way to balance the two? Is balance even possible? Which one do you struggle the most and why?

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