Spider-Man & The Amazing Taste Gap
In Good Enough I shared my struggle to publish.
A close friend, Donny Winston, replied with an excerpt from Ira Glass on The Taste Gap.
Taste Gap Primer
Your early work is not good. But you have good taste. Taste enough to know that your work is not good. This is the taste gap.
It’s the grand canyon between your ambition and your skill.
How to close that gap?
Do a high volume of work. Set a deadline. Fight through the embarrassment. And share.
My assumption is that this gap is widened by a fixed mindset.
Fixed & Growth Mindset
Fixed mindset says I’m born with skill. It mutates struggle from a universal experience into a personal invalidation. It persists at the bottom of the canyon. blinding me to the climb before me.
In contrast, growth mindset is a climbing rope. Adopting it means believing that skills are developed, not inborn. That my brain grows + shrinks with usage. That I close the gap with volume of work + time + feedback.
In a fixed mindset is the taste gap ignored or rejected? Is it a choice between skills I’ve been born with and those not meant for me?
False Growth Mindset
Growth mindset is not just an adoption of belief. It’s a deliberate practice.
Students need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they’re stuck. They need this repertoire of approaches —not just sheer effort—to learn and improve. - Carol Dweck in a follow up to her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Tiago shared a workflow strategy called the Archipelago of Ideas. As seen below: I guide my writing experience with material from my second brain.
My note-taking app (Bear) is the sandbox where I make new shapes with old abstractions.
The blank page is less of a lonely experience and more of a saloon where I might run into something interesting.
For instance.
Spider-Man & The Amazing Taste Gap
I’ve been reading early issues from Marvel comics.
A few screenshots below from The Amazing Spider-Man (#8, 1964). The villain in this issue is “The Living Brain,” an ultra-smart robot that goes haywire during a demonstration at Midtown High.
Ask it a question and it spits out an answer based on available data. It can even figure out the real identity of Spider-Man.
Why bring up Spider-Man in this post?
Like any person with ambitions beyond waking, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko faced critics. In early comics fans shared criticism of storylines, characters, and drawings (and it never stops).
Who’s my worst critic…?
If the taste gap pits me (with good taste) against me (with bad early work), I’m not letting the one with good taste win. And I’m not getting rid of the one with bad early work. Instead, I’m going to force those two to work together like a pair of buddy cops.
Or in Marvel’s parlance: like Spider-Man and Human Torch. See The Amazing Spider-Man (#19, 1963). Backstory here: they used to be frenemies until Sandman and the Enforcers try and take them out. It’s a decent read.
Takeaways
If Stan and Steve stopped early on we wouldn’t get the Sinister Six in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual (#1, 1964), just a few issues later. Or any of the other great storylines and threads.
Adopt a growth mindset that values effort over outcome
Use strategies to get unstuck and look for feedback
Share often
Please share your feedback, comments or questions. It’s been super helpful in my journey.
PS. The same issue with the Sinister Six (Spider-Man Annual #1) has a great mini-comic depicting the writing/sketching process between Stan and Steve. You can read it and many other classics with Marvel Unlimited (subscription-based).