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).

More on preliminary work here: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/draft-dem...

Choosing your constraints is an inherently creative decision, because it is foundational to all the other creative decisions you make.

There are no creative chords. There are creative chord progressions.

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.

Life is good.

The most creative things I've done have come from stealing ideas. My longest running project has been sewing. I was tired of buying shirts and them not fitting, so I went out on a journey to reproduce a shirt I owned that fit perfectly. I designed the pattern, made the software to design the pattern, learned how to sew, and a year later I have a perfectly fitting T shirt (with my own adjustments to the original inspiration).

I made a replica of a watch that was too expensive. I made a pair of shoes because the real version was too expensive. I made illustrations based off other art.

I'm an engineer who likes art, not an artist who likes engineering. Stealing ideas, making your process efficient, and creating a great product are all what's important to me... not something like capturing my raw and original emotions in the work.

There's so much to glean from this for anyone who wants to create!

If you're working with an AI to make your thing, know that even though its first output looks great, it's nowhere near as far as you can go if you keep going, use it as a tool, and still put in the same time and energy you'd have done if you weren't augmented.

People can tell if you've vibed something and they can tell if you've cared enough to instead build it fast but still sweated the details.

I'm reminded of the Nick Raskulinecz interview[0], where he prevailed upon Rush to re-use some of their motifs because "you own that" and there would be no shame in alluding to their own art instead of always doing something fresh.

So you hear a little "Bastille Day" in "Headlong Flight". Oh, yes.

[0] https://youtu.be/oQognzPVOIo?is=XAiy0EhMps3QrdrR

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.

ok, sure, but for a stone cold autodidact it actualy is an effort to remember the last thing that worked rather than just figure something out that works now, sometimes it is a bit ridiculous as I will catch myself spontainiously comming up with a completly new method to do something mundane, and realise, no I dont have all day for this. the best way I get around it is to build tooling, which I will then remember I have, and can then look at and see how to use. on the guitar side , improvising constantly can as the author states, make finnishing songs immpossible, so I bust them.down to two or three chords, and put my efforts into HOW I sing the words, which realy does take focus, or just go for lead lines, and or arpegiating chords, and trying to match vocals with that.Doing nothing but solo work now, so there is nothing to hold me down or work with or too. In any case, I do agree with the author that strategic narrowing of focus does bring benifits, but nothing feels as good as pulling off a big flex.

I was programming a lot and felt that my mind was getting somehow rigid, for lack of a better term. So I took up scrabble since I thought that that maybe is a different type of thinking, but it really isn't as you are just using logic to predict valid words that may or may not exist. So I took some creativity courses, mostly painting, and those were great for my brain. But then the pandemic happened and they were shut down.

I've taken some hobbies since then and haven't felt the need to do something other than programming and my hobbies since then - having these other interests (mushroom collecting, weightlifting, hiking, etc) has been enough.

Why does every article have to start with a biography these days?

Related, Dan Harmon on writing and lowering the stakes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6DDCA0GwU4

"You can just start taking what you do less seriously"

"When we consider it our job to do better than we can do, then we don't do anything, because you are waiting for you to come up with something you don't come up with. By contrast if you simply shit it out, and consider it your job to do it wrong, to do what you would do, and embrace the idea that you are going to suck, that's closer to what chefs do carpenters do..."

Love this!!!