Stick with it and keep buying lottery tickets

There’s a video of Ira Glass that every so often starts circulating again. Ira Glass is one of my favorite people in the world and the creator of This American Life, the radio show that pretty much defined how narrative radio and podcasts work. A while ago he gave an interview to Current TV (do you remember Current TV? Al Gore’s Current TV?) where he talks about the storytelling techniques they employ at This American Life and also says something remarkable about working, and specifically beginning to work, in a creative field. That bit was transformed into a, for lack of a better term, “typographic montage” and is the video that every few months I see popping up again and again. The reason is that he says something fundamentally true about beginning doing something. This is the video:

https://vimeo.com/24715531

What Ira Glass says is basically: stick with it. Stick with it even if you suck at it. Because your skills may not be developed enough yet but your taste is. You can see that what you are making is not good enough and that taste will guide you to fill in the gap if you stick with it. It happens to everyone, just keep working and don’t give up. I love Ira Glass and I went back to these words over and over again during the years.

But there’s also another aspect to this that I think it’s often ignored (because it’s damn hard to face). I encountered it almost randomly by watching a recording of a XOXO talk and both the presentation format and the content blew me away. So… I’ll give you the chance to experience the same thing. If you think you will have 20 minutes to watch this video below in the next few days, stop here and just come back later. And I know it’s hard to trust this kind of statements but, I promise, you won’t regret investing 20 minutes on this.

So, if you don’t have time here’s the summary: Darius Kazemi, bot-maker extraordinaire, goes on and on and on for about half of the video above to build a powerful and surreal parallelism between making things and lottery. He talks about the experience of success as similar to buying lottery tickets. Investing energy and effort in researching and understanding the lottery and, finally, finding the one ticket that has the right numbers. And then he says something reassuring and terrifying at the same time: «I believe that beyond a certain threshold of work that you put in your projects, success is entirely out of your hands». Because every project is a lottery ticket, and luck is what makes the difference between success and not success.

I think Ira Glass is right: put in the hours and something good will come out the other end. But I also want to think that Darius Kazemi is right: doing something with a lot of passion and investing a lot of energy in it doesn’t automatically entitle me to success. It’s just another chance and if it doesn’t work, it’s not necessarily my fault. The one thing I can do is to keep buying lottery tickets.