Sublime

This experience and others like it have taught me that when an interviewee clams up, it’s sometimes out of fear that the journalist he’s speaking with won’t fully comprehend what he’s saying or simply won’t care. This was an important lesson: It’s one of the reasons I try to be well prepared for each interview, on the assumption that a guest is mor

Small imperfections, which make a work human, make it beautiful. “If my hands shake,” he says as he talks about this, “it is not because I am an alcoholic. It’s because I’m honest!”

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste,” says public radio personality Ira Glass. “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.”

The creators and innovators whom I meet, if they do struggle with criticism and perfectionism, also understand the importance of allowing their product to be judged by the marketplace, and the opportunity that users’ feedback presents to make the product better as a result. They know that they need an abundance of feedback to dial in their product.

Steve stopped me as I walked back to my seat and said, “You know what your problem is?” I had never spoken to my hero before, so I was flummoxed. “No?” I managed. “You’re not nervous up there, so you have to have a great story every time.”

I believe that: A book is going to have a voice and I have to find it.