Categories: Articles

What Does Great Work Look Like?

Is what you are creating any great?

Over the years, I have watched many super-creative people with amazing taste quit. They didn’t push through. They didn’t keep at it. For as many great bloggers that I follow today, I have a huge list of people who were stunningly great at it, but they quit. They ran out of juice. No more steam left in the engine. Podcasting too. I’ve been podcasting for a long while (every week), and so many of the shows that I used to love (and could not wait to hear) have ceased to exist. Here is a powerful message from the one and only, Ira Glass (the man behind This American Life). He is a storyteller and creative force that we should all be paying more attention to. As someone who writes, I often grapple with the notion that what I am working on “is not quite good enough… yet.” It’s nice to know that this feeling of constant self-judging may, in fact, be pushing me in the right creative direction. I’m glad that I didn’t quit. I hope you don’t quit too.

He is a two-minute thought from Ira Glass about where you will find your most creative output…

(hat-tip to Erica Diamond for the find and for sharing it).

But wait, there’s more!

If you’re really into that two-minute tirade of creative inspiration, I will highly recommend that you watch this “in conversation” session with Ira Glass from a talk he did at Google back in 2013. It’s over an hour, but it will inspire as well. Promise.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.