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If you're an ambitious person,

then you like me are also probably

somewhat of a perfectionist,

whether you're trying to write a novel

or make videos or record your own music,

the work that you're creating right now

probably doesn't measure up to your standards.

There's always some tweaking you could do

or something you could change or some improvement

that you could make, but it seems like

no matter how much tweaking you do,

it still never quite measures up

to that vision you have in your head, right?

This is called the taste gap,

which is the term that was coined

by the podcaster, Ira Glass.

You're inspired to start creating

by other art that you know is good,

which means that you start out with great taste

but as a beginner your skills

don't quite match up to that taste, and by extension,

neither do the first things that you create.

And I recently got an email from somebody

that echoed this exact idea.

They were in the process of writing a novel

but they were frustrated with the fact

that the quality of their own writing

didn't match up to that of their favorite authors.

The taste gap was still there,

despite the fact that they were able

to successfully and accurately analyze

what authors did, the way they described environments,

the way that they developed characters.

Now, you might not be writing a novel

but it's likely that you've experienced something similar

in some other discipline that you've been a part of.

So what I want to talk about in this video

is a rule that I've used successfully

over the past few years.

Start closing this taste gap,

and actually start making progress

instead of remaining paralyzed by my own perfectionism.

It's called the one percent rule

and before we get to the specifics of it,

I want to do a quick thought experiment

that will hopefully put things in perspective.

So picture in your mind's eye,

if you will, your normal everyday routine.

Think about the mundane boring sequence of actions

that you go through every single day,

but with one slight twist.

You haven't done any of them ever before.

Now you've seen other people do them,

so you know how to do these things,

but you have precisely zero experience

with brushing your teeth, with tying your shoes,

using a microwave.

You don't know how to read and how to write.

You don't know how to use a computer.

You've never done any of these things in the past.

But again, you've seen people do them

so they should be easy.

Now in this thought experiment

you can probably come to the conclusion

that if you've never done these things before

you're gonna have a hard time with them.

In the real world, the only reason your able

to go through your routine, basically on autopilot

is because you've done every single action

in that routine so many times

that they've all become habitual.

Now, most people intuitively understand this,

but a lot of them fail to apply it

to the art that they wanna make and the skills

that they want to build.

Writing a novel is just like your daily routine

in that the process of doing it

contains lots of individual steps.

And your favorite fantasy author

has spent years, or possibly even decades,

practicing each and every one of them.

At this point, certain parts in the writing process

are automatic for these people,

which means that they can now focus all of their attention

and their creativity on other things.

Meanwhile, as a beginner,

you're over here trying to split your brain power

between adequately describing environments

and developing characters and relationships

and catching plot holes and 800 other elements

that you haven't practiced before.

This is why you're experiencing the taste gap.

You simply haven't had enough time

or enough tries to make some of these sub-skills

into nearly automatic habits.

And this is what stops a lot of people in their tracks

because so many people are unwilling

to let their idealized perfected vision

for their first piece go,

and as a result they never finish it

and they never develop the necessary skills

to close that taste gap.

That's where the one percent rule comes in,

and it's really simple, it just has two parts.

Number one, put yourself on a schedule

and publish on a regular basis.

It could be a once a week schedule.

It could be a once a month schedule.

That will allow you to not get mired

in perfectionism because you know at a defined point

in the future, you're going to have

to say this is good enough,

it's going out I'm shipping it.

Number two, each time you make something

on your defined schedule,

focus on getting one percent better

in some element of that discipline.

This is exactly how I got over my own perfectionism

when I started my YouTube channel.

I had that taste gap.

I was watching tons of YouTubers

that I really looked up to,

and I understood what made their content great,

but I couldn't replicate it myself.

So, instead of getting mired in perfectionism

I put myself on a once per week deadline,

and with each video I would try to focus on something new.

Sometimes I would focus on the audio.

Sometimes I focused on my delivery as a speaker.

Sometimes I would get really into animation.

I remember one week, I was learning

how to keyframe animations so I can make pictures

move across the screen.

And then another week I got really into After Effects

and learned about easing curves

so I could get rid of linear motion

and make more natural motion.

And then eventually I got into really complex masking,

and if I were to try to do all these things at once,

well, I would have failed on my first try.

But because it was focusing

on just one of them for each video,

I didn't get overwhelmed and I started

to build a repertoire of skills, over time.

Now, I understand lighting setups.

I understand audio.

I understand animation.

I understand lots of elements

that go into the process of making great videos,

but it took four or five years to get to this point.

Now the one percent rule is something

you can apply to any discipline that you're pursuing.

It doesn't have to be video making.

Because let's face it, video making is a pursuit

that is very easily broken down into different steps.

Pretty much anyone can identify that there's lighting,

that there's audio, there's on-camera presence,

animation, all these different things

that you can focus on.

So let's take one more example

that's a little bit harder to break down.

Let's take the discipline of singing.

I remember when I started singing

I thought it was pretty difficult

to identify exactly what a great singer was doing

to sound the way that they did.

But this is a discipline where the one percent rule

can apply as well.

In this case, you just need to do

a little bit of extra work beforehand to figure out

what the sub-skills are,

and that can involve, working with a coach like I do,

or just going and doing a little bit

of extra reading or joining an online community

where people can give you some pointers.

And eventually you're gonna learn

about all kinds of different sub-skills.

There's resonance.

There's eliminating nasality in your singing voice.

There's dynamics, vocal fry, head voice,

and enunciation, singing with emotion.

And once you've identified those sub-skills,

then you can go start picking projects

that allow you to focus on one at a time.

For instance, I have a whole bunch of playlists on Spotify,

that breakdown singing skills.

So I've got one for high voice training.

I've got one for low voice training.

I've got one for really powerful singing

that utilizes a lot of vocal fry.

And since I have one vocal lesson per week,

I usually pick one or two songs to work on and practice

and make recordings of, which means that I'm essentially

on a once per week schedule with singing as well.

So to recap the two big benefits,

of the one percent rule are number one, the deadline.

As the old aphorism goes perfect is the enemy of good

and well, a deadline is the enemy of perfect,

meaning that it's the friend of good.

And it's also the friend of completion.

Putting yourself on a schedule

means actually finishing things.

And let's just say you put yourself

on a once per week schedule for two years,

that means two years from now you're gonna be able

to turn around and look back on a body of work

containing more than 100 finished projects.

Secondly, there is the improvement,

because focusing on getting one percent better

in a new area with each project

means that over time you get vastly better

in many, many different sub-areas of your discipline.

Again, if you make 100 things over the course of two years,

that means you've given yourself 100 opportunities

for practice and improvement,

and each time you're picking one new area of focus

you continue learning and expanding your horizons,

but you're also gaining more practice

in the areas that you have focused on before.

Now I do want to point out one resource

where you can go to learn the sub-skills

in whatever skill that you're trying

to build and that is Skillshare.

On Skillshare you're gonna find a library

with thousands of in-depth courses

covering video editing, photography, illustration,

animation, and even productivity.

And since I talked about my own video editing journey

in this video, the course that I want to recommend

this week is how to make an animated YouTube video

by my friend Evan who runs the channel PolyMatter.

And if you go to his channel

you're actually gonna see evidence

of the one percent rule in action

because he's been publishing consistently for years,

and you can see gradual improvement

in his videos over time.

And you also might want to check out Jake Bartlett's course

on Animating With Ease in After Effects,

especially if you wanna learn how to start doing

some of the things that we did in this video.

Also Skillshare is an incredibly affordable platform

with unlimited access to their platform

starting at less than 10 bucks a month,

which basically makes it like a Netflix subscription

that's a lot more useful to your future

and your skill development.

And even better if you want to get a two-month free trial,