Why Great Art Requires True Grit
Excellent creative work doesn’t happen; it’s the result of endless iteration and tweaking
Published in
3 min readNov 22, 2019
If you’re looking for what separates “okay” from “excellent,” you’ll find it between seconds 26 and 35 in French musician Soprano’s smash music video, “Le Coach.”
Did you miss it? Watch the first half-minute again to see if you can guess.
I’ll give you a further clue. It starts at exactly second 28.
Still don’t have any idea what I’m talking about? Okay, I’ll spill.
It’s the clinking of the coach’s whistle.
Watch the video closely, though. The clink doesn’t always happen when the whistle itself is bouncing. In fact, during seconds 1 to 27, the whistle is bouncing with absolutely no sound at all. What does this mean? It means the whistle sound is not coming from the coach’s whistle at all. It is more likely coming from a place like this:
