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being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
maalvika.substack.com
This torment has a name in cognitive science: the “taste-skill discrepancy.” Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called “the gap”" but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.
Watch a child draw. They create fearlessly, unselfconsciously, because they have not yet developed the curse of sophisticated taste! They draw purple trees and flying elephants with the confidence of someone who has never been told that trees aren’t purple, that elephants don’t fly. But somewhere around age eight or nine, taste arrives like a harsh critic, and suddenly the gap opens. The child can see that their drawing doesn’t match the impossible standard their developing aesthetic sense has conjured.
This really resonates with me. I feel like I have a childlike sense of adventure around creating, and not much fear of failing. But my persistence on particular projects or efforts needs more work in order to reach the taste that I can envision for them.