This American Life host and producer Ira Glass is among our era’s most beloved storytellers. In this wonderful short motion graphics piece, filmmaker David Shiyang Liu has captured Glass’s now-legendary interview on the art of storytelling in beautifully minimalist and elegant kinetic typography. The gist of Glass’s message for beginners — that grit is what separates mere good taste from great work, and that the only way to bridge the gap between ability and ambition is to actually do the work — is one that rings true for just about every creative discipline, and something I can certainly speak to in my own experience.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Look for more of Glass’s singular lens on storytelling in The New Kings of Nonfiction, his fantastically curated anthology of essays by some of today’s finest nonfiction storytellers, the introduction to which alone is an absolute literary masterpiece.

via Coudal