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If you're an ambitious person,
then you like me are also probably
somewhat of a perfectionist,
whether you're trying to write a novel
or make videos or record your own music,
the work that you're creating right now
probably doesn't measure up to your standards.
There's always some tweaking you could do
or something you could change or some improvement
that you could make, but it seems like
no matter how much tweaking you do,
it still never quite measures up
to that vision you have in your head, right?
This is called the taste gap,
which is the term that was coined
by the podcaster, Ira Glass.
You're inspired to start creating
by other art that you know is good,
which means that you start out with great taste
but as a beginner your skills
don't quite match up to that taste, and by extension,
neither do the first things that you create.
And I recently got an email from somebody
that echoed this exact idea.
They were in the process of writing a novel
but they were frustrated with the fact
that the quality of their own writing
didn't match up to that of their favorite authors.
The taste gap was still there,
despite the fact that they were able
to successfully and accurately analyze
what authors did, the way they described environments,
the way that they developed characters.
Now, you might not be writing a novel
but it's likely that you've experienced something similar
in some other discipline that you've been a part of.
So what I want to talk about in this video
is a rule that I've used successfully
over the past few years.
Start closing this taste gap,
and actually start making progress
instead of remaining paralyzed by my own perfectionism.
It's called the one percent rule
and before we get to the specifics of it,
I want to do a quick thought experiment
that will hopefully put things in perspective.
So picture in your mind's eye,
if you will, your normal everyday routine.
Think about the mundane boring sequence of actions
that you go through every single day,
but with one slight twist.
You haven't done any of them ever before.
Now you've seen other people do them,
so you know how to do these things,
but you have precisely zero experience
with brushing your teeth, with tying your shoes,
using a microwave.
You don't know how to read and how to write.
You don't know how to use a computer.
You've never done any of these things in the past.
But again, you've seen people do them
so they should be easy.
Now in this thought experiment
you can probably come to the conclusion
that if you've never done these things before
you're gonna have a hard time with them.
In the real world, the only reason your able
to go through your routine, basically on autopilot
is because you've done every single action
in that routine so many times
that they've all become habitual.
Now, most people intuitively understand this,
but a lot of them fail to apply it
to the art that they wanna make and the skills
that they want to build.
Writing a novel is just like your daily routine
in that the process of doing it
contains lots of individual steps.
And your favorite fantasy author
has spent years, or possibly even decades,
practicing each and every one of them.
At this point, certain parts in the writing process
are automatic for these people,
which means that they can now focus all of their attention
and their creativity on other things.
Meanwhile, as a beginner,
you're over here trying to split your brain power
between adequately describing environments
and developing characters and relationships
and catching plot holes and 800 other elements
that you haven't practiced before.
This is why you're experiencing the taste gap.
You simply haven't had enough time
or enough tries to make some of these sub-skills
into nearly automatic habits.
And this is what stops a lot of people in their tracks
because so many people are unwilling
to let their idealized perfected vision
for their first piece go,
and as a result they never finish it
and they never develop the necessary skills
to close that taste gap.
That's where the one percent rule comes in,
and it's really simple, it just has two parts.
Number one, put yourself on a schedule
and publish on a regular basis.
It could be a once a week schedule.
It could be a once a month schedule.
That will allow you to not get mired
in perfectionism because you know at a defined point
in the future, you're going to have
to say this is good enough,
it's going out I'm shipping it.
Number two, each time you make something
on your defined schedule,
focus on getting one percent better
in some element of that discipline.
This is exactly how I got over my own perfectionism
when I started my YouTube channel.
I had that taste gap.
I was watching tons of YouTubers
that I really looked up to,
and I understood what made their content great,
but I couldn't replicate it myself.
So, instead of getting mired in perfectionism
I put myself on a once per week deadline,
and with each video I would try to focus on something new.
Sometimes I would focus on the audio.
Sometimes I focused on my delivery as a speaker.
Sometimes I would get really into animation.
I remember one week, I was learning
how to keyframe animations so I can make pictures
move across the screen.
And then another week I got really into After Effects
and learned about easing curves
so I could get rid of linear motion
and make more natural motion.
And then eventually I got into really complex masking,
and if I were to try to do all these things at once,
well, I would have failed on my first try.
But because it was focusing
on just one of them for each video,
I didn't get overwhelmed and I started
to build a repertoire of skills, over time.
Now, I understand lighting setups.
I understand audio.
I understand animation.
I understand lots of elements
that go into the process of making great videos,
but it took four or five years to get to this point.
Now the one percent rule is something
you can apply to any discipline that you're pursuing.
It doesn't have to be video making.
Because let's face it, video making is a pursuit
that is very easily broken down into different steps.
Pretty much anyone can identify that there's lighting,
that there's audio, there's on-camera presence,
animation, all these different things
that you can focus on.
So let's take one more example
that's a little bit harder to break down.
Let's take the discipline of singing.
I remember when I started singing
I thought it was pretty difficult
to identify exactly what a great singer was doing
to sound the way that they did.
But this is a discipline where the one percent rule
can apply as well.
In this case, you just need to do
a little bit of extra work beforehand to figure out
what the sub-skills are,
and that can involve, working with a coach like I do,
or just going and doing a little bit
of extra reading or joining an online community
where people can give you some pointers.
And eventually you're gonna learn
about all kinds of different sub-skills.
There's resonance.
There's eliminating nasality in your singing voice.
There's dynamics, vocal fry, head voice,
and enunciation, singing with emotion.
And once you've identified those sub-skills,
then you can go start picking projects
that allow you to focus on one at a time.
For instance, I have a whole bunch of playlists on Spotify,
that breakdown singing skills.
So I've got one for high voice training.
I've got one for low voice training.
I've got one for really powerful singing
that utilizes a lot of vocal fry.
And since I have one vocal lesson per week,
I usually pick one or two songs to work on and practice
and make recordings of, which means that I'm essentially
on a once per week schedule with singing as well.
So to recap the two big benefits,
of the one percent rule are number one, the deadline.
As the old aphorism goes perfect is the enemy of good
and well, a deadline is the enemy of perfect,
meaning that it's the friend of good.
And it's also the friend of completion.
Putting yourself on a schedule
means actually finishing things.
And let's just say you put yourself
on a once per week schedule for two years,
that means two years from now you're gonna be able
to turn around and look back on a body of work
containing more than 100 finished projects.
Secondly, there is the improvement,
because focusing on getting one percent better
in a new area with each project
means that over time you get vastly better
in many, many different sub-areas of your discipline.
Again, if you make 100 things over the course of two years,
that means you've given yourself 100 opportunities
for practice and improvement,
and each time you're picking one new area of focus
you continue learning and expanding your horizons,
but you're also gaining more practice
in the areas that you have focused on before.
Now I do want to point out one resource
where you can go to learn the sub-skills
in whatever skill that you're trying
to build and that is Skillshare.
On Skillshare you're gonna find a library
with thousands of in-depth courses
covering video editing, photography, illustration,
animation, and even productivity.
And since I talked about my own video editing journey
in this video, the course that I want to recommend
this week is how to make an animated YouTube video
by my friend Evan who runs the channel PolyMatter.
And if you go to his channel
you're actually gonna see evidence
of the one percent rule in action
because he's been publishing consistently for years,
and you can see gradual improvement
in his videos over time.
And you also might want to check out Jake Bartlett's course
on Animating With Ease in After Effects,
especially if you wanna learn how to start doing
some of the things that we did in this video.
Also Skillshare is an incredibly affordable platform
with unlimited access to their platform
starting at less than 10 bucks a month,
which basically makes it like a Netflix subscription
that's a lot more useful to your future
and your skill development.
And even better if you want to get a two-month free trial,
you can actually sign up with the link down below
and get that while also supporting my channel.
And by the way, I actually have a brand new
Skillshare course coming out in January, 2020.
So even if you sign up right now
and activate that two-month trial today
you're going to get free access
to that course when it comes out.
By the way, thanks so much for watching this video.
Hopefully you found this useful.
It's definitely a rule that has been very, very useful
in my life so I really hope
that you can apply it to yours as well.
And if you enjoyed this video
definitely hit that like button
so the YouTube algorithm kind of
likes my channel a little bit more, I guess.
Otherwise you can get subscribed right there,
if you haven't done so already,
And also maybe subscribe to my music channel right there
if you want some cool tunes in your life, I suppose.
Otherwise I'm gonna throw a couple more videos
on the screen that you can check out if you want,
and I will see you in the next video.
(soft music)