what's the point of the story?

Ira Glass shares with us how to tell stories.

he’s talking about video production, but his points are easily applied to any other "creative" realm.

In this insightful series of videos he explores anecdotes and reflections and what they mean to the story.

But hidden within his "reflections" are some very interesting thoughts, like being in charge of telling a story means being ruthless editing what works and is interesting.

Finding a decent story takes more time than producing the story. Anybody in the creative field should spend enough time looking for stories.

Failure is a big part of success. You need to be on a schedule to produce things every week and before you know it, you will have something special, something people are going to want.

The most important thing for you to do is to do a lot of work. (my personal favorite)

The first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good — it’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point quit.

And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. We knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have and the thing to do is — everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.

Two mistakes most people who start make are: we imitate the people who are already doing what we want to do.

But you need to be yourself. There is already a real one of who you want to imitate.

The second problem is that we tend to be interested about ourselves, but in most stories the other person is more interesting.

Make sure to watch all 4 videos on you tube.