[The] gap between your abilities and your taste is not a gap to be crossed but one to be cultivated. As you build your craft, whether it’s writing or radio or glass blowing or leading a team, you develop ever more ideas about what’s possible in your work. As your skill grows, so too do your ambitions, such that your taste always and forever outstrips your abilities. For every increment of improvement, you extend your desires out that much further. This is not to say you will never be satisfied with your work—although, that is a not uncommon scenario, and not necessarily as dreary as it sounds. But rather that as you become more capable, you are wont to find as much joy and satisfaction in the process of developing your skill as in the outcomes of it. The work of creativity, at the end of the day, is the work of creativity—not what you create, but who you become in the act of creation.

Mandy Brown