The Taste Gap

Earlier this week, I came across this incredible clip featuring NPR's Ira Glass: On Storytelling 3 (5 min 20 secs)

If you don't have five minutes to spare, let me give you a short summary of this clip.

When you get into any creative endeavour, you do so because you have a great sense of taste.

For example, if you choose to pursue art or podcasting or cooking, it's because you know what great art looks like, great podcasts sound like, and great food tastes like.

The problem is, when you're starting out, the stuff you create will very likely come nowhere near your taste, and this causes a gap.

When most people realize the vastness of this gap, they give up.

Ira's advice for not giving up is two-fold: 1. Do a lot of work, because eventually that work will get better. 2. Realize how normal this gap is.

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I would like to build on that advice with two additional points.

The first has to do with lemons.

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I have been interested in becoming a better cook for many years.

Cooking, like most creative fields, is vast.

While I haven't chosen a specific cuisine to get better at, my general aim is to just cook better meals at home.

I have been fortunate to eat great food from different parts of the world. Primarily South and Southeast Asia, so most of my taste comes from there.

Recently, I've been experimenting a lot with lemons.

The juice, the zest, the rind, all of it.

Lemons add acid, and acid can do magical things to a dish, when used correctly.

So I've been playing around to figure out when and how to use lemons correctly.

The first point I want to add to Ira's advice on closing the taste gap, is to focus on a specific element of your work to improve.

The more specific the better.

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The second point I'd like to add to Ira's advice, has to do with Andy Bernard from The Office.

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In real life, Andy Bernard is Ed Helms, and Ed Helms was on a podcast I love recently.

He talked about his early days as a comedian, and how they were really hard—it's obvious that he was navigating the taste gap.

One of the things he mentioned, really stood out to me as a practical tool for navigating the taste gap.

When he first got into comedy, one of the things he did was surround himself with other people who were also getting into comedy.

He found his people.

To me, this is different from having a group of people around you who love and support you, but aren't pursuing a creative endeavour themselves.

In other words, you need a group around you who are also navigating the taste gap. These are your people.

They don't have to be pursuing the same thing as you—that's a bonus—they just need to be pursuing any creative endeavour.

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So there you have it.

As you keep navigating your own taste gap, zoom in on a specific detail of your work, and find your people.