The Un-Natural

by blogrdoc

In case you don’t have time to view the vid below (which I recommend), This American Life host, Ira Glass, keenly observes that many people engage in a creative outlet and they genuinely have very good taste in that genre. At the outset, it’s very frustrating because he wasn’t producing good content, but since he had pretty good taste, he was acutely aware of how bad it was. This is definitely something I can relate to. It’s just comforting to know that Ira, whom I admire, went through the same thing.

I remember as a freshman in college, I was terrible in chemistry lab. I was always the one that ended up with a really low yield because I mixed up the chemicals wrong or I was one of the last ones to leave. Another thing was that I was really clumsy and slow.

Today, I throw chemicals around now like it’s nothing. I manually handle extremely delicate, expensive semiconductor crystals without even thinking about it. Like Ira prescribes, the key is practice.

The only thing I would add to Ira’s advice is: Lose yourself. Don’t worry about failing and concentrate more on getting the job done.

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  1. 3 Responses to “The Un-Natural”

  2. By chris on Jun 5, 2008 | Reply

    I’m a big Ira Glass fan too. New teachers that I train are always amazed how I can teach without notes and very little preparation; my response is always “do it often and do it enough”

  3. By Alik | PracticeThis.com on Jun 5, 2008 | Reply

    my favorite part is “the key is practice”.
    ;)

  4. By blogrdoc on Jun 5, 2008 | Reply

    @chris: you remind me then of my favorite prof in college. All he ever brought in was a folded up sheet up paper. Totally brilliant

    @Alik: I think you *really* came up with a sticky domain name. I remember a couple months about thinking about how cool your whole ‘practice this’ theme is.

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