Ira Glass — On Being Wrong

The fear of being wrong leads people to resist change. Then again, the state of actually being wrong is a big reason why people (and organizations) change. I’m fascinated by people who are willing to talk about their own wrongness and how they got past it.

Through an interview on Slate.com, you can see that the career of NPR’s Ira Glass was initially a tale of his dogged persistence in the face of his own incompetence. Glass used an extreme version of the Uncle Paul Principle ("Just Show Up"); he spent a decade showing up in radioland despite a total lack of outside encouragement. He burrowed his way step-by-step into skills needed for audio storytelling.

Everybody has a drama, a struggle that they went through, and for me it was turning myself from somebody who wasn't any good at this thing into somebody who's really, really good at it. I was a great intuitive story editor from the start, but writing, interviewing, performing on the radio—I was just terrible at all of that. All through my 20s, my parents were like, "Why are you doing this?" I wasn't making any money, and I was so bad at it. I was 19 when I started at NPR and I was 27 or 28 before I could competently put together a story that I had written. All that time, I just stubbornly pushed toward this thing because I thought it would work out in some form. I was right about that, but I was wrong about pretty much everything along the way.

It seems like that history makes it a little easier to deal with the regular failures involved in creative endeavors. Glass — the chief maestro of This American Life — says it is not unusual or his staff to go through 25 or 30 ideas, produce eight or 10, and then kill most of those to end up with three or four final pieces.

I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it's usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it.

Then again, that’s better than working at The Onion. Glass once watched the editorial staff there at a weekly headline meeting, where they cull the week’s 600 headline ideas down to just 17 that ultimately generate that week’s set of stories. Yikes!

[Photo courtesy of Tom Murphy VII at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ira_Glass]