Ira Glass on Story

I wasn't going to post again tonight (I have an itchy trigger finger, must go shoot some virtual terrorists or something) but this set of short video clips from Your Daily Awesome was too good not to pass along. The clips show Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, talking about storytelling. There is some very useful advice in the 8 or so minutes available. A few of the things he touches on I thought were particularly interesting. He says that it is essential that you produce a lot of content before you can get good at your craft (practice makes perfect), that you must be critical and cut all the bad stuff as much as possible as entropy drives everything towards disorder (and bad stories), and that the disparity between your critical eye/ear and what you yourself can produce will be an extremely large chasm. Those who never push themselves beyond that will never be good at what they do (or they completely cease producing) while those who brave push hard against the boundaries CAN go on to produce something worthwhile.

Useful advice for any part of your life.