Never give up....even your worst work is leading you somewhere amazing.

This is very inspiring. I am certain that all creative people have had their fair share of self-doubt and have even considered just giving up entirely. What a powerful message and one that I think we all need to be reminded of every so often.

I know that I have personally sat at the head of my own pity party table many times, thinking to myself  ‘you will never be good at drawing or painting’, yet when I pick up my sketchbook and compare page 1 that was done twelve months ago to pages I have recently done, the progress is so evident. I now know that even those not so pretty pages are in fact just as perfect as those that I personally love because in each of them a valuable lesson was learned that enabled me to grow as an artist. Had I just given up on page 1, I would have never gotten anywhere.

It is my wish that every artist be able to move past the fear of failure we all experience and learn to acknowledge and honor the perfection in everything they create.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or 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. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

—Ira Glass