The Fugly Truth
My daughter is a full-time content creator, and her career is being an Influencer. A couple of months ago, one of her videos went viral, and she now has 7.6 million followers. Those who don’t know her or think about things too deeply, she appears to have come out of nowhere - from zero to fame in one fell swoop. But as a mom, all I could think of was how long she’s been at it.
Our daughter has always been self-propelled. When she was in elementary school, she used to copy her homework so it would be prettier. She wasn’t interested in television but spent her junior high school years watching makeup artist Michelle Phan on YouTube. In high school, she joined the drama department to help her overcome shyness. While her peers applied to dozens of schools, she applied Early Decision to one Ivy League college and mercifully got accepted.
She started creating content during college. She struggled with filming, photography, and editing. You could tell that she knew what she wanted her output to look and feel like, but it just wasn’t turning out the way she intended. She was her own worst critic. She would call me and tearfully report how ugly the Instagram post was or how awkward the video was to film. But something made her keep trying. She was experiencing the creativity gap.
Ira Glass of public radio fame explained it perfectly:
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.
Author Malcolm Gladwell also tells a similar message in his book, Outliers. He said it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. That's 417 days' worth of hours, or three hours a day for 3,333 days--a little over nine years. The math works out for my daughter.
10 years later
It’s been ten years since my daughter made her first YouTube post and four years since she quit her corporate job to focus on content creation. As a corporate slave, I thought the two jobs she had out of college were impressive enough. But she had much bigger aspirations, and I’m so glad she was confident enough to keep at it, despite my regrettable moment when I referred to being an Influencer as not a “real” job.
I wasn’t visionary enough to encourage her to move beyond a traditional career. Despite my misgivings as a corporate slave, the best I could envision was that she would be a more successful corporate slave than me. Bitches, what was I thinking?
A happy child is a happy mama. I’ve been proud of our daughter since the day she was born. But as she enters true adulthood at 29 years old, I’m not only proud but inspired by her. I should keep up this newsletter writing for ten years. How fun it will be to look back and laugh at how cringy these early essays were!