Nobody starts out good. The artists who make it aren't the most talented — they're the ones who were willing to make a lot of bad work to get to the good stuff. In this episode, Jake makes the case for why being willing to suck is the most underrated skill in any creative's toolkit.

It's not a fun lesson, but it might be the most important one: most artists struggle because they're simply not good enough yet. And the only way through that is to make a lot of work that isn't good.

In this episode of Move Faster, Jake gets honest about what he's seen after years of casting actors and running a creative agency — and what he's experienced himself losing jobs he wasn't ready for. The gap between where you are and where you want to be isn't closed by waiting. It's closed by reps.

He brings in three artists who prove the point. Ed Sheeran's "dirty tap" analogy — at first the water runs brown, but you keep it running until it clears. The A-Team took 20 minutes to write, but only after hundreds of songs that didn't work. Russ put out seven albums with no traction, then released a song a week for two and a half years before things broke. And Kobe Bryant ran three practices a day with the simple logic that if his competitors were doing two, he'd eventually be unreachable.

The formula is unglamorous: make more art, get better faster, and let people call you an overnight success when you've actually been grinding for a decade.

In this episode:

• Why most artists aren't making it — and what's actually in the way
• Ed Sheeran's dirty tap analogy and what it means for your creative output
• How Russ went from seven ignored albums to breaking through with a song a week
• Kobe, Phelps, and the math of doing more reps than everyone else
• Whether you need to post your work publicly — or if you should just put your head down for five years