A few years back, I wrote a screenplay.
It took me a year to write it, so I was really pumped. I did what any excited writer would do. I shared it with my friends.
They read it. Some really liked it. Others were⊠polite. A few even gave thoughtful notes.
I was too close to the script, so I wasnât really sure about it. Letâs just say I wasnât quitting my day job yet.
A few months after that, with a fresh mind, I opened it again to revise it.
Yeah, it wasnât great. It needed a lot of work. My friends were too kind.
And hereâs the thing that bothered me most: I knew good writing when I saw it. Iâd watched great movies, read great scripts. I had good taste. But my own writing wasnât matching it. Not even close.
The Taste Gap
Turns out, this experience has a name.
Ira Glass, host of the Pulitzer Prize-winning radio show âThis American Lifeâ, calls it the âtaste gap.â
Talking about creative work, Glass explains that you get into it because you have good taste. Something resonated with youâa book, a film, a songâand it made you think, âI want to do that too.â
But when you start making things, what comes out isnât good yet. âItâs trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but itâs not quite that good. But your tasteâthe thing that got you into the gameâyour taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what youâre making is kind of a disappointment to you. You can tell that itâs still sort of crappy.â
This gap isnât just a beginner thing. It can last for years.
To demonstrate this, Glass played his own clip from his NPR days. He was 27, eight years into his radio career and already deep in the industry.
It wasnât good. The writing was unclear, the delivery unnatural. Listening back, Glass said he couldnât follow what heâd been trying to say.
Eight years in, and the work still wasnât measuring up.
Why Some People Quit (And Others Donât)
Glass says that most people quit in the taste gap. They see their work isnât good enough and interpret it as proof theyâre not cut out for this.
Yet some people keep going. They stay in the gap, keep making bad work, until eventually they get good.
It comes down to mindset. Psychologist Carol Dweck has spent decades studying how people think about their abilities, and sheâs identified two distinct patterns: Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset.
People with a Fixed Mindset believe talent is innate. You either have it or you donât. So when their work sucks in the beginning, they think, âThis proves Iâm not good at this.â The taste gap for them is definitive failure.
On the other hand, people with a Growth Mindset believe skills develop over time. When their early work falls short, they think, âIâm not there yet. Let me try again.â
Dweck demonstrated this in a study with students. She gave them ten fairly challenging problems from an IQ test. Most students did pretty well. Then she praised them, but in two different ways.
The first group heard: âYou must be smart at this.â
The second group heard: âYou must have worked really hard.â
One group was praised for ability. The other for effort.
Then Dweck gave them harder problems. The students whoâd been praised for being smart struggled. And when they struggled, they thought it meant they werenât actually intelligent after all. As Dweck puts it, âIf success had meant they were intelligent, then less-than-success meant they were deficient.â
They lost motivation. They stopped enjoying the problems. Their performance got worse.
The effort-praised students faced the exact same difficulty. But they didnât see it as evidence of lacking intelligence. They just saw it as a sign they needed to work harder. They stayed motivated, kept enjoying the challenge, and their performance actually improved.
Closing the Taste Gap
Closing the taste gap requires creating crappy work, not seeing failure as definitive, and adopting a growth mindset.
Glass says the only way through is volume. âThe most important thing you could possibly do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Itâs only by going through a volume of work that youâre going to catch up and close that gap.â
That could mean one script per year. One short story per month. One sketch per week. Pick a pace you can maintain and commit to finishing things.
Letâs keep writing. Letâs keep creating shitty work. Until eventually, it gets better.
This is something I see all the time in ambitious people stepping into roles that demand new levels of output. Their internal standards rise immediately; their skills follow slowly. The gap between the two becomes emotionally charged. Not just uncomfortable, it often feels existential.
When your nervous system is wired for performance, ânot good yetâ is interpreted as ânot good enough,â and the body goes straight into threat mode. So people stop, avoid, overthink, or burn more fuel than necessary.
The growth mindset frame is spot on, but what helps my clients most is learning to tolerate the emotional noise of imperfect beginnings. Once that tolerance grows, creativity and consistency become much easier â not because the gap shrinks immediately, but because it stops feeling dangerous.
Question to the author
Iâm curious: in your experience, what helps people stay in the taste gap without collapsing into self-criticism? Is it mainly repetition, or do you see certain emotional or cognitive shifts that keep them going?
This is so spot-on. In both clinical work and writing, I see people hit the taste gap and assume itâs a verdict rather than a phase. The mind interprets âthis isnât good yetâ as âIâm not good,â and that collapse between effort and identity is exactly what shuts people down.
What you said about volume resonates, not in the hustle sense, but in the nervous-system sense. Repetition is what rewires skill, tolerance, and self-trust. The early work almost has to be bad because our taste develops faster than our ability. That mismatch is painful, but itâs also the proof that we care about the craft.
Some of my own pieces I wrote months ago make me cringe, and that used to feel embarrassing. Now it just feels like evidence Iâm doing the work.
Really loved this â especially the reminder that closing the gap isnât glamorous. Itâs just showing up, writing through the discomfort, and letting the brain catch up to the taste that pulled us here in the first place.