The Algorithm Has Made Us Afraid to Be Beginners

When I was 15, I wrote a book.

A whole book. An aggressively unpublished book.

I sent it to literary agents because I had the confidence of a teenager and none of the useful information. They sent back rejection letters because they had standards and, presumably, eyes.

Then I started filming my friends skateboarding and snowboarding. I made what I later described as “a few crappy movies”.

This is still the most accurate critical review of my early filmography.

The book did not become a book deal. The movies did not get into Sundance. Nobody asked me to explain my creative process on a podcast.

Thank god.

I was allowed to be bad long enough to become interested.

That used to be a fairly normal way to begin. You tried something because it pulled at you. You borrowed the wrong equipment. You made a version nobody needed. You showed it to three friends, one of whom was mostly being supportive because you had driven them somewhere recently.

You did not need a launch strategy for the first evidence that you cared.

Now every new interest arrives with an audience already attached.

Decide you want to run and, within an hour, you can see the training plan, the watch, the shoes, the gels, the cold plunge, and a man with three percent body fat explaining Zone 2 from a Scandinavian kitchen.

Buy a camera and the feed immediately introduces you to photographers with fifteen years of work, perfect color, a signature preset, a sold-out workshop, and a bag that costs more than the camera you were nervously considering.

Try writing and you are shown the newsletter growth system before you have written something you would miss if it disappeared.

The internet is incredible at showing us what mastery looks like. It is less good at preserving the quiet, unremarkable stretch before mastery becomes visible.

That stretch matters.

It is where you learn whether you like the work or merely like the person you imagine becoming if the work goes well.

The feed collapses the distance between curiosity and comparison. You are six minutes into a new interest and already losing to someone who has organized their adult life around it.

So we compensate. We research harder. We buy the correct setup. We learn the vocabulary. We announce the project because public commitment is supposed to create accountability.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it turns a small curiosity into a performance review before it has had one afternoon to breathe.

My early work was not private because I possessed some deep creative philosophy. It was private because distribution was f*cking annoying.

Uploading video took forever. Cameras were worse. Editing was slower. My audience was mostly friends, family, and whoever had accidentally subscribed during a more confusing period of their life.

The friction was inconvenient, but it created a useful boundary. Making and publishing were separate decisions.

Now the camera, editing suite, audience, analytics dashboard, storefront, and monetization advice all live inside the same rectangle in your hand.

This has created real opportunity. I built much of my career by becoming obsessed with the bridge between creative work and distribution. I brought a camera to the beach, started paying attention to Instagram, and eventually became more interested in the machinery of marketing than any normal person should admit in public.

I am not arguing that artists should hide forever or that distribution corrupts the work. Making something for another person can sharpen it. An audience can create stakes. Feedback can expose the difference between the thing in your head and the thing that arrived.

But an audience changes the work.

That is not always a problem. It is simply a reason to decide when the audience enters.

AI makes this tension stranger.

It is now possible to become presentable at something before becoming competent at it. You can generate the logo, the landing page, the launch post, the curriculum, the content calendar, and twelve tasteful mockups for a project you have spent forty-three minutes actually doing.

Again: useful. I use these tools constantly. They have helped me build products, research unfamiliar subjects, pressure-test ideas, and move from vague thought to working artifact much faster.

But speed changes what you can skip.

A rough first attempt used to reveal exactly where your hands, ears, judgment, or understanding were weak. Now AI can sand down those signals before you have looked at them.

If the first song sounds decent, the first essay reads cleanly, and the first app resembles a startup, you can mistake presentation for progress. The output looks less embarrassing. You may understand it less.

The danger is not that AI helps beginners. A patient AI tutor can make starting far less intimidating. The danger is asking it to rescue every early attempt from looking early.

Beginners need help. They also need evidence of where they are beginners.

Ira Glass described the painful distance between your taste and your current ability: you know the work is not good yet because your taste is already good enough to notice. His advice was not to eliminate that gap. It was to make a large volume of work until your ability catches up.

AI can help you cross the gap.

It can also generate a tasteful little bridge that lets you avoid seeing the gap at all.

I understand the urge to ask every interest what it could become. I have spent years building systems that make work compound. I can turn a new curiosity into a folder structure before the curiosity has finished introducing itself.

This is occasionally useful and frequently a cry for help.

The moment something interests us, we ask what it could become:

Could this be content?

Could this become a product?

Could I build an audience around it?

Could it make money?

Could I become known for this?

Those are not bad questions. They are just late questions arriving early.

Austin Kleon describes a hobby as creative work that is just for you… something you do without trying to get rich or famous from it. I like that definition because it gives the activity time to affect you before you demand that it perform for everyone else.

The first job of a new practice is not to become useful.

It is to determine whether you want to return.

This is less of a doctrine and more of a 30-day protection plan for a fragile new interest. I am writing it because, frankly, I need it.

Do not decide to become a photographer. Go take pictures.

Do not announce that you are writing a novel. Write one page tomorrow and another the day after that.

Identity can create commitment, but it can also create a costume you start maintaining instead of a skill you are developing.

For 30 days, use verbs.

Public commitment can help with goals that already matter to you. It is less reliable when you are still figuring out whether the interest is real.

Give yourself one month without a launch post, progress thread, new bio line, or tasteful screenshot of the workspace.

Nobody needs to know yet. That is the gift.

Use what you have, borrow something, or buy the smallest credible version.

I say this as a person who once promised to begin film photography with a practical camera and then [bought a Leica M3](https://www.35mmc.com/08/02/2024/falling-in-love-with-film-promising-to-not-buy-a-leica-m3-part-one/). I am aware that my authority here has been compromised.

The point is not to make deprivation part of the hobby. It is to keep shopping from impersonating practice.

Ten photographs. Ten meals. Ten sketches. Ten tiny programs. Ten pages. Ten attempts at repairing the same motorcycle part while saying words the service manual did not anticipate.

You need enough material to notice what keeps pulling you back.

Do not monetize the first attempt. Do not package the third. Do not build the course while learning lesson four.

Ask it to explain a term, critique your attempt, suggest an exercise, or help you understand why something failed.

Do not automatically ask it to replace the part you are trying to learn.

If you are practicing writing, write before requesting a rewrite. If you are learning design, make the layout before asking for variants. If you are coding, explain what the code should do before accepting a generated solution.

Let AI shorten confusion. Do not let it remove contact with the craft.

Save the crooked photographs, dead paragraphs, bad cuts, weird color grades, broken prototypes, and ideas that seemed profound at 1:14 a.m.

Do not post them as a humblebrag carousel about “the journey.” Just keep them.

Your early work is evidence. Later, it will show you which problems disappeared through practice and which ones keep following you because they are part of your taste.

After 30 days, ask:

- Do I want feedback, accountability, connection, opportunity, or simply attention?

- Would sharing help the practice continue?

- Am I showing the work, or trying to establish the identity?

- If nobody cared, would I make the next one?

Publish when the audience gives the work a useful consequence.

Keep going privately when attention would make the work smaller.

I do not want a life where every interest becomes a business, every observation becomes a post, and every small act of curiosity has to explain its strategic value.

That sounds productive. It also sounds exhausting, man.

Some of the most useful things I know began as things I was bad at for no defensible reason. Writing a rejected book taught me to finish. Filming my friends taught me to frame and edit. Photography made me pay attention. Publishing introduced me to distribution. None of those lessons arrived because I had correctly mapped the outcome in advance.

They arrived because I stayed near the work.

Maybe the answer is not to reject the algorithm, hide every ambition, or pretend we do not care what other people think. I care. You probably care. Most people who claim otherwise are either enlightened or lying, and I have met fewer of the first group.

The answer may be simpler.

Protect the beginning.

Give the new thing a little time before you ask it to become impressive, legible, profitable, or public. Make a few bad versions. Let your taste hurt your feelings. Return anyway.

You are not behind.

You are beginning.

What is something you would try if you were allowed to be bad at it privately for 30 days? Reply and tell me. I am looking for ideas that have not hired a growth team yet.

-zc

P.S. If this made you want to protect one strange little interest from the feed, subscribe to Don’t Feed The Algorithm. That is more or less the entire assignment around here.

- Ira Glass on the taste gap

— The classic explanation of why good taste often makes early creative work feel especially painful.

- Austin Kleon in praise of the good old-fashioned hobby — A useful defense of creative work that gives without needing to become a career.

- The Creative Independent guides — Practical, emotionally intelligent advice from working artists without much productivity cosplay.

- Stanford’s guide to growth mindset — A compact primer on treating early failure as information rather than identity.

- Wanting Things Without Irony — A related argument for admitting what you want before self-awareness turns into camouflage.

- The Internet Is Full of Correct Answers. I Miss Opinions. — On why access to endless polished answers does not replace developing a point of view.