While I like the punchy title, I'd suggest the often invisible role of preliminary work IS a part of being creative. In music it's "demos," in art it's "sketches," in writing it's "drafts," etc. I write in my book, Creative Doing:
> This stage is far too early to demand perfection; it’s best to keep expectations low, to refrain from self-criticism, and to support psychological safety (the feeling that it’s okay to make mistakes) to allow every single detail of the idea to flow out.
It's related to the original post's mention of scarcity, and how "the path to writing a great song really is through hundreds of mediocre songs." The most reliable way to good work is to allow it to emerge through a lot of preliminary work (e.g., lots of drafts, demos, and sketches).
Am an aspiring composer. We often say we have no qualms about "stealing" from other composers. Yeah, if we see an idea or technique used in piece of music we like, we won't hesitate to try it out in our own pieces. Of course, we don't actually steal to the point of plagarism, but it's pretty common to do, and the ideas we take are often modified for your own needs or just taken in parts.
Started having way more fun (and making better music) when I released the "need" to make everything from scratch and just started dragging and dropping loops.
Now it's like I'm back in 2003 when my feature phone had a little music composer thing on it. You'd just slap together some presets.
It's the NPRificiation of everything. I had to stop listening to BBC Radio 4 because most documentary programmes have basically just become This American Life with British accents.
> This stage is far too early to demand perfection; it’s best to keep expectations low, to refrain from self-criticism, and to support psychological safety (the feeling that it’s okay to make mistakes) to allow every single detail of the idea to flow out.
It's related to the original post's mention of scarcity, and how "the path to writing a great song really is through hundreds of mediocre songs." The most reliable way to good work is to allow it to emerge through a lot of preliminary work (e.g., lots of drafts, demos, and sketches).
More on preliminary work here: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/draft-dem...
https://note.com/apt_crow7500/n/n440c1a6cfb63?hl=en
Now it's like I'm back in 2003 when my feature phone had a little music composer thing on it. You'd just slap together some presets.
Life is good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsufMtUOXtI
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html