Even a talented person takes years, even a decade

I'm a big fan of the radio program “This American Life”. The main personality of the program, Ira Glass seems to be a die-hard public radio guy and very talented. If you hear a couple of episodes of the program (all past episodes are available online), you know what I'm talking about.

And I got to know an interview with him is available on YouTube.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


A “O'Reilly Radar” posting and a “Signal vs. Noise” posting mention the part 2 of the interview regarding the importance of discarding not so great things to make a superb thing.

But to me, equally eye-opening was he took a decade or so to get to the level of a good radio reporter/producer. He played his radio reporting at his 8th year as an example of crappy one. He also said that many people cannot bear the gap between their superb taste and their not-up-to-snuff outcome and quit a career. He emphasizes that it's inevitable at the early stage of a career and the only way to overcome that is keep working.