Yeah, creativity is hard. As Ira Glass put it:

> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

(full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...)

I really wish "just make something" was that simple, but for people who are already full of self-doubt, it might not make things any better, especially for people with high standards. There are ways to get around this (see the rest of the Ira Glass quote), but it's not the panacea the article makes it out to be.

I've run across this quote a few times recently and like it a lot. But there's always the nagging doubt / imposter syndrome telling that you don't really have taste either.

Like the people who can taste good food, can't necessarily cook good food.

Perhaps it's just enough that you care about something and want to get good at it.

I liked Sal Khan's TED lecture [0] about the possibility of us all having the capacity to be cancer researchers in the same vein that people 200 years ago assumed that only the best would be able to read.

  [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTRxRO5SRA

I think developing taste is actually the hardest part. For example, most aspiring musicians start out enamored with a particular style because it impressed them in their early life. It takes years to make sense of things and find your unique personal concept of "good music". Many don't even reach the realization that it's a worthwhile goal. Similar with visual art, etc.

Developing the skill to evaluate something is different from developing the skill to produce it.

If they were the same, then all the front-end developers and UX experts would both work the same job. Some people can, and it's usually those who have developed skills for both.

Self-awareness of your skill level is the first step to developing it.

The problem comes with how you define success.

Do you define it as how your answer or creation measures up to everyone else, or do you define it as you made significant progress in a field you had very little prior experience with. In my math escapades, it's linear algebra, for you it may be differential calculus, etc.

Basically if you always measure success in comparisons to others, you are always going to be disappointed. There are very few times where this isn't true -- such as you entered in a competition for worlds best overall mathematician, which almost doesn't exist, because you have to pick one thing and specialize in it.

Just realize if you take the time and effort to practice, you will achieve success. We all have the same brain, and barring any learning disability, every human has the same potential for amazing learning, the only difference between those seemingly geniuses with perfect answers that solve problems in a way you could never conceive, is they practiced more, and thought about it more.

> every human has the same potential for amazing learning, the only difference between those seemingly geniuses with perfect answers that solve problems in a way you could never conceive, is they practiced more, and thought about it more.

I completely disagree, and I think this attitude, which I find more prevalent in North America, is at the root of a lot of depression and feelings of lack of self worth. It's the same as saying that "person X is more successful than person Y because they wanted it more / worked harder at it"

In the end we do not have all the same brain, and we do not have all the same capabilities, thinking that we do in my opinion makes it a lot more likely to develop feelings of lack of self worth (I still suck at this, it must be my fault)

There's a weird divide here.

Some people find the innate ability mindset oppressive and saddening, and are greatly comforted by "you can do whatever you set yourself to!"

Other people find growth mindset oppressive, and greatly prefer "you can't be the next Gauss, so stop feeling bad about his achievements!"

None of which is a strictly relevant to what's true, of course. The answer there seems to be "lots of skill is inherited, skill plus effort is required to truly excel, but skill and effort are often interchangeable except at the highest levels".

But for whatever reason, I'm in the second camp with you on which narrative is depressing. A lot of growth mindset writing is almost physically uncomfortable for me. I appreciate the value of hard work, but believing that everyone is equally capable completely contradicts my life experience, and implies that 99.9% never fulfill our potential in even a single domain.

I used to prefer the growth mindset and now I agree with you.

I think what changed for me is that I got good enough to regularly interact with people at the "highest levels" of what I do. Teaching probably had some impact on me as well.

I still work hard and enjoy improving, but if I'm completely honest with myself, I'll never be as good as some of the people I regularly interact with. Their minds are gifts that no amount of hard work can compete against (especially because they're also incredibly productive... which in some sense is, I think, also a genetic gift. I need my 8 hours of sleep and can't consistently work more than 10 hour work weeks.).

Since having that realization, I've noticed that most people in my life who prefer the growth mindset happen to work in occupations where there isn't a lot of room for variation -- or where variation in productivity is almost completely explained by factors under your own control. E.g., factory work, truck driving, and the sort of healthcare occupations you can do straight out of high school. Or in one case, a software dev who puts in his 40 doing very standard C# LoB CRUD apps.

Figuring out that there's an essential difference between my environment and theirs was a huge relief -- it's not that I wasn't working hard enough (I definitely was), it's that the type of work I'm doing is much more sensitive to variation in natural ability.

Maybe ignorance is bliss when it comes to the growth mindset.

>Maybe ignorance is bliss when it comes to the growth mindset.

"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."

The less you know, the less you know you don't know.

Being a knowledge junkie, ignorance would be bliss. But once you know you can't easily go back and un-know.

to me it's more that everybody is born with a certain set of multipliers, say the "average" human has 1.0 everywhere, to reach competency level X you need Y * 1,000 hours.

You can be born super lucky to get, say, a 100 multiplier in playing the oboe, you will be considered "gifted" and you will rush past your peers, however all you have is a multiplier, if you put in 100 hours and somebody with a 1 multiplier puts in 20,000 they will become better than you despite your "gifts". But if somebody that has a 100 multiplier puts in 20,000 hours then they will reach levels that you could never ever reach due not having enough time in your life to do so.

On the other hand, unfortunately there are plenty of cases where you might get a 0.1, 0.01 or even 0.001 multiplier, and in those cases you can work hard as much as you want, but you will never ever become more than competent at whatever this is even after a lifelong pursuit. I am pretty sure for example I have a 0.01 multiplier at painting unfortunately.

In the end one always needs hard work, but there should be the understanding that due to how you are born, your hard work might not ever give you the level of performance you would like to have, and that's nobody's fault. This is also why the people that excel at something and go "it was all about hard work, you can do this too if you try really hard" do a great disservice to everybody else.

If you "try really hard" you cannot become an astronaut unless you are genetically lucky and have all the required physical attributes, same deal about becoming a world class anything.

It does feel like the only way not to get depressed is to tape/record yourself regularly at anything you do, always save some of your learning efforts (paintings, musical performances, woodworking things, ...)

I personally am lifelong learning playing the pipe organ, and midi record every single practice I do: when I feel bad about a perceived lack of progress, I play some midi files of six months ago or whenever and I am instantly reminded that yes, I am progressing slowly but I am progressing quite a bit. The only thing I personally have issues with is that no matter how well I learn a piece I will always make at least a couple of mistakes when playing it, I wish I could get a piece perfect but it seems that whatever my multiplier is for "perfection" it is a lot lower than the multiplier for "good enough"

This is a great model - honestly it's much closer to my intuitive sense than what I wrote up.

I think most people can be decent at most things, certainly. Humans are (almost always) normally distributed, and odds are you're between 0.5 and 2 on most scales. If you want to run a 5k, or play guitar for fun, or make a website, your multiplier probably won't stop you.

But if you want to be the best, or you're choosing a goal where demand is short (astronauts, professional tubists, etc), you'd better think about your multiplier. There's a reason music schools are so viciously selective, and it's that hard work isn't going to get you a career unless you're somewhere up in that 100+ territory.

I'm pretty sure I'm down around .1 for music. I'm fairly tone deaf, my sense of rhythm is crappy, and I've never found any part of music intuitive. I've played some instruments, I don't regret it, but I'm certainly not going to go stake much of my time on being even middling-competent.

You touch on one thing that I think is a huge deal - people with big multipliers don't necessarily feel it. That top-notch musician knows they worked their ass off, but can't experience how they would have done with a worse multiplier. It's like listening to successful founders say that you should just focus on your idea and "it'll all work out in the end" - that's sample bias like no other.

I didn't get really skeptical about pure effort and growth mindset until I started working out how specific people learn. The gulfs in effort for different people on the same achievement are shocking, and this model is far better for understanding that.

> If you want to [...] play guitar for fun [...], your multiplier probably won't stop you.

Well, mine did :-D

After 3 years of practice, I could still not accurately do what a kid can do after 1 week, or someone who plays another instrument after 20 minutes.

It was time to throw in the towel and admit that there are hopeless cases and that I was one of them :-)

The worse thing is that I did not have great expectations when I started, since I don't have any interest and even dislike complex music. But I couldn't even reach my very very low expectations... By far... since 3 chords were 2 too many and the other one would never come at the right time :-D

I like this idea of a gift-effort balance. Everyone requires a different mix to shine. But effort seems more important, as I see hard-working "average" people excel more often than lazy geniuses.

Yes.

But, I think the key realization is that whenever the incentives are strong enough, a lot of hard-working geniuses will be fighting for the prize. Hard-working geniuses are really hard to compete against, and if you don't realize that natural variation is a real thing, you can get discouraged pretty quickly.

Screw those hard-working geniuses, always turning life into a freakin' competition ffs.

Just to clarify, that's not my opinion at all!

Usually, those people are making disproportionate contributions to the world for comparably small rewards. Usually. We're lucky to have Einsteins and Bachs and Taos and an infinitude of less well-known but probably equally capable hard-working geniuses. I'm very grateful for hard-working geniuses who devote themselves to important problems! Some of them do apply themselves toward more secular ends, such as Gates. That's OK too, although the world takes care of gratefulness for me ;-)

It's just important to realize they exist if you ever get into a situation where you're regularly competing with them.

Agreed. At this age, I'm content to let the hard-working geniuses move the world forward and inspire me, while I do the best I can in my limited corner of it.

I learned this one looking at mathematics graduate students. There's plenty for non-geniuses to do, but someone who wants to be exceptional at their work should almost certainly pick a different field. There's a ridiculous amount of brainpower in the field, and if you're not near the top you're never going to be one of the superstars.

> don't realize that natural variation is a real thing

Google shows me nothing but out-of-context biology-textbook material, so I'll ask: what is the relevance here of "natural variation"?

I didn't mean it as a technical term.

I just meant "some people are smarter/more productive than others for reasons beyond either person's control at the time of measurement".

So it could be environmental factors (access to better support or higher quality educational experiences in early childhood). Or just genetic. I'm not positing any specific causes, just making a general observation that I find to be true of the world I see around me: especially at the highest levels, some people really are just smarter than others, and no amount of hard work could close the gap.

I think comparing is inevitable.. going through a lot of this now personally and sometimes i wonder how much a factor is the size of the pond you swim in.

I agree comparing with others is inevitable. I also think you can derive joy and satisfaction in comparing against your self (i.e. your previous work). Admire your improvements, however small, and pat yourself on the back for having persistence. It might seem hollow/shallow, but I really believe it's a powerful way to frame skill-building.

Good point. Also, much of the value in creativity is due to the fact that you do it your way. If you write a poem or a song, it says what you want to say, the way you want to say it. No one else can do that.

> The problem comes with how you define success.

Exactly. With math, you must focus on the journey at least as much as the destination. While the proof motivates the effort, the mastery of math comes not in deriving elegant proofs, but in devising 'A' proof, then remembering how you did it so you can later: 1) use the method again in other proofs and 2) improve on the proof, often by learning from others. Nobody jumps straight from zero to hero.

Like chessmasters, only the best mathematicians invent techniques. Most just employ what they've learned in inventive combination play.

I think the implication is that you should try to create something away from the internet, note how the poster goes to a class and creates a beat and is getting positive reinforcement from people at the class

If he had created a beat on his own, posted it on soundcloud/youtube and posted, say, on reddit, he would've likely gotten trolled or put down or compared to any number of amazing beatmakers and it would have added to his depression instead of helping him get over it.

I don't think we are equipped to deal with the fact that there is somebody younger than us better at anything we can think of than we could ever be, and those somebodies are also instantly accessible from anywhere at any time for comparison purposes.

In the old days, say, you could tell yourself "ok, the teacher/master craftsman/... that is teaching me is so much better than me because they have a lifetime of experience, when I will be their age I will have learned and will be just as good", but now you can find endless amounts of people younger than you already amazing at what you are trying to do, and you think to yourself what's the point when they are already there and you have just started.

Nowadays with most of the world connected you can find hundreds of "one in a million" people you can compare yourself to: and if you are depressed it is really really hard to want to get started at anything, because getting started at something means months or years of being objectively pretty bad at it, months where you can tell yourself "what's the point, youtubeuser999 is a kid and they're already better at this than I ever will be"

It is also hard because one of the ways to get better, is to compare yourself to people better than you and try to figure out what they are doing that you aren't, and incorporate that in your practice. If you are in a beginner art class with a teacher walking around and you are all around the same level, you can get a lot of benefit from looking at others and listening in.

But if, thanks to the internet, you have Michelangelo on your left, Leonardo on the right, Vermeer in front of you and Tintoretto behind, and you are just trying to learn to draw a face that doesn't look like Frankenstein, it is going to be extremely discouraging.

I think the internet's "Michelangelo on your left" effect is more subtle, but equally dangerous.

Say you do truly believe that you can stand out in whatever crowd it is. Certainly that's true of a learners' meetup in person, but that could be an online community, in which you find a niche or a community with a greater demand for creative work than supply. (Soundcloud is not such a place, but consider fandoms as an example.) You believe that you could get positive reinforcement of the value of your work from making something, be it a table or a beat. You find and engage with that community. Awesome, that's the first step!

The problem that then arises is that doing things at the level of quality that folks come to expect from this new world of democratized creation (and you're a perfectionist at some fundamental level, of course, who browses the Internet and will see exemplars of whatever craft you want to pursue)... is that even if you believe you can get to their level, you need to put the time in to practice your craft. Like "the free time of a teenager" levels of time (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori ). And if you're already in a place where you feel guilty for misallocating the hours of every day of every week of every month for a very long time... then the clarion call of huddling in bed, or reading a website, or playing a video game with instant gratification, can quickly drown out the impulse to create. A comfortably unsatisfying safety blanket from which it is very hard to escape.

There's a much lower barrier to entry to writing HN comments, that's for sure...

"I don't think we are equipped to deal with the fact that there is somebody younger than us better at anything we can think of than we could ever be"

This is the plot to Amadeus:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086879/

Well said and as someone commented earlier about "building a table" I think there is some sense of accomplishment and utility you can get from that vs something in tech.

Then deliberately set your standards low. I used to have a "bad art night" where I'd create something, no matter how crappy, just to say I'd done it.

Perfect is the enemy of good; good is the enemy of good enough.

This is why I've enjoyed my time taking improv classes. I'm with a group of other complete beginners and failure is encouraged. It has a beginning and end, and whatever happens will only happen once ever. I go home with a sense of completion and accomplishment, but I don't have the feeling of having to show anyone else for validation.

Jim Butcher tells the story, in various interviews, how he started the wildly successful Dresden Files series with trying to write terrible formulaic genre fiction to prove to his teacher that it would be terrible, and ended up with something marketable.

Example interview: https://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/interview...

(search for "Writing the Genre Fiction Novel")

That's how I used to get over writers block. I just start off with deliberately writing crap.

I don't think it'll actually help, but I don't think it'd hurt, either. Thanks for that; I'll give it a whirl.

The problem, though, is that I often lack the motivation to do even little things. Sounds like that's the case for folks with depression, too.

If you steer towards areas that don't have a "right" answer it might be easier. I used making a set of shelves out of planks of wood last weekend to manage my mood. They're not going to be the best shelves in the world; there's no "right way" to build shelves. They're not even going to be the best shelves I can make. In fact, as a physical artefact, they're kinda shoddy.

It really doesn't matter: making them got me into a flow state, I got a ton of carpentry practice out of them, and as a handy side-effect I NOW HAVE A NEW SET OF SHELVES. Woo.

(Also I need to buy a finishing saw. Oh no, more tools, whatever shall I do.)

This hits me almost every time I think of something. Recently someone suggested to me a game of "snake" (like the old QB game) that used the tilt sensor in the phone to direct the snake. Should be pretty simple.

A few searches later and I'm looking at super-realisticly rendered WebGL demos of mobile 3D pinball examples and thinking "there's no way I could ever implement something like this".

Anything I can think of already exists, and already exists better than I could do it.

I've had this thing where I'll think about all the things I'll never do.. At 17, I'd go "I'll never be as good as Gauss". At 19, "Jesus, Lagrange taught at college at age 19". At 20, "Galois died at 20..Damn.."

The only thing that I have going for me is that I have dissociated my emotional/psychological state and my intellectual pursuit to become smarter than I was the day before. I can work on stuff when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when tears are wetting the paper, when it's cold, when it's hot, when I'm anxious, when I'm relaxed. The first thing I did after college is trying to come up with a studying schedule to undo the harm of not making the most out of it.

This is great, right? The downside is that, judging myself even more harshly than when I judge myself compared to others: If I can work in all conditions and everyday, how come I still suck at everything and can't do anything well. I haven't found an answer to that, yet.

Mozart died at 35 ... of strep.

I'm missing your point. Do you mean he was unlucky not to have lived enough, or to have died of strep? (the 'or' is a boolean 'or', not a colloquial one. i.e: not mutually exclusive).

Just continuing the theme of, "When so-and-so famous person was your age, he was dead"

Hmm, the only death example was Galois. Not sure we can make a theme out of that. Also, I'm not sure: are you 35 and are talking about yourself or something made you think I am?

I'm adding a synonym to 'pedant' in my online dictionary: 'jugurtha'

My replies to your comments were questions to elicit further details because I didn't understand what you meant (maybe an inside joke, maybe a gem hidden in there) and I didn't want to go with assumptions and possibly miss meaning. You called me a pedant for that.

<pedantry>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugurtha

</pedantry>

Think at this as an exercise in programming. You don't write a game of Snake to make THE game of Snake. You write it to learn something and hone your skills (same way as someone taking a Math course solves simple and typical exercises).

Getting over this hump in thinking is hard though - I was crippled for years by "CREATION MUST BE PERFECT". It's only recently I've managed to adjust to thinking "all of this is good practice" and dumping almost everything I make out to the public.

Well, as you might already imagine, that is an unrealistic attitude to have. One of the points of these creative endeavors is to have fun and improve yourself, little by little.

The expectation that you must "dunk over Michael Jordan" to do so is a bit absurd.

“We have to reinvent the wheel every once every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors.” - Bruce Joyce

Keeping your head up while (inelegantly) solving tons of problems yourself is an crucial step to solving them well.

Creativity includes discovery and invention. I would assume that if you put all your eggs in the basket of discovery, then you are kind of just throwing the dice. (on Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns")

That's why Elon Musk says he didn't pursue his idea of using capacitors as batteries. It relied too much on whether or not there was something to be discovered. So he went with things that definitively could be built, where he was sure that "success was at least a possible outcome." ("Known unknowns")

So I would think that you should choose your project wisely, where, again, you can be sure that success is at least possible.

> I have notice this a lot with math.I will work on a problem and then a Google search later reveals that the problem is not only completely solved

It seems to me that you're letting yourself be paralyzed by something that really has no bearing here. You will note that the article does not say "solve a hard math problem first and best". It says "do something with your hands and your feet". The two are not comparable.

It seems like a good example of the described problem, however. I could also attempt to make a table, and I will conclude that I have seen many better tables made, which could make me feel bad.

The hard part is letting go of being the best, or even succeeding, in my opinion. It's cliche, but the attempt is what matters. If you run a marathon to win it, you will almost certainly be disappointed; but if you run it to be a better runner, to be healthier, or simply to say you did, you will be happier having done it than having not done it because you know you won't win.

Pick a subject without much difficult craftsmanship or creativity. One where you can just execute. Grow carrots. You won't worry about there being larger or nicer looking carrots grown by others.

I restore old bikes. It's easy mechanically, cheap, and projects are short enough to never be overwhelming (unlike e.g a car project). It's a nice analog change from computers.

Yeah, carrots are hard to grow. Saying they are easy are going to make people feel even shittier when they try

Actually, I do garden and have a hobby car (which probably frustrates me more than it makes me happy).

But you've obviously never seen a gardening competition. People absolutely worry about growing bigger and nicer looking carrots.

Comparison is the thief of joy. :)

As someone who tries to practice CBT for depression / anxiety, this reminds me of a cognitive distortion, all or nothing thinking. Either it's the best in the world, or it's garbage.

One thing that helped me is realizing that there is ALWAYS going to be someone who does something better than me. You are still learning when doing things, you're still getting better.

It's a corny saying but it's true: winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners.

Plus the web rubs in our faces the output of all of 8 billion people on the planet, of which tons are bound to be far better at what we want to do, while simultaneously depreciating the value of both local talent (since now you compete internationally for attention), and global talent (since the channels are saturated and people have 2000000 outlets to care much for any particular one).

Trying to create something doesn't have to mean being original.

Writing a song is hard. Learn how to make beer. Or fix up an old bike. There are tons of things you can do that involve creating something, that involves physical activity, a sense of achievement and produces a tangible result, but doesn't have the element of creative block or impostor syndrome.

I generate tileable patterns on my phone using Defqt, Decim8, and iColorama. Doesn't require hardly any mental energy and it's pretty certain that you're going to generate something unique. Plus it's a quick cycle (~10-60s) which means you're not getting stuck on any single one.

Don't do the Google search until you're ready to check your answer, and even then don't copy anything you find. It's better for your growth and learning to work the answer out yourself. Not only that, sounds like it's better for your mindset to come to a complete conclusion and then compare instead of getting stuck on how other people have done things. You'll learn how to refine your work eventually, but for now "the problem is completely solved" means essentially nothing. Sounds like your current work is homework for when you start pushing boundaries. This is getting rambly, but maybe you'd benefit from a Coursera class or two in math and then maybe a graduate university night course?

Perhaps a bit out of the left field, but one suggestion would be to make sketchnotes [1] of some useful idea that you would like to share. For example, a summary of a book or article you read. Do it on paper, snap a picture and post it online. That way you create something which is meaningful to you, but you can also share it and it might help others too. Also, this is the kind of creation where you usually do not have to compare with others.

The obvious con of course is that it can be really time consuming.

[1] http://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/

Why do a startup, if someone else or a group may eventually do it better?

You can outsource all the work and spending money to others lol. This is also true of "effective altruism".

Why be so egocentric as to want to try to change the world? It is going to change anyway.

Take these questions seriously, I would like to hear some answers. I think it is to leave some mark because of our desire to exercise power and control over our environment. For men, it is an instinct to leave a trace that is independent of our biological lifespan. (Most women have an instinct to have children.) The desire to get really rich from helping many people. And finally, the desire to do something you like and have it be meaningful.

Taking your math example, if the people who are currently at the forefront were constantly worried about where they ranked along with everyone else, they never would be where they are now. There are a few exceptions of course but they're the exceptions.

I could give a damn if I'm #5 in the world or number #5,000,000,000 in the world for x. I just want to be as good at x as I can be. I get a little bit of joy every time I get a little better at it.

>The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you.

But the only way to get very good and end up being one of those "others" who make the best things is to push past this point and keep making things anyway. Of course you're not the best in the world at something when you first start doing it. Nobody was. How could you be?

The problem is, everyone who devoted their entire life at something, worked with insane intensity, and devoted themselves wholly to it, is not the best in the world either, except one.

Being "the best in the world" is not necessary. By definition, there can only be one "best in the world" at any given endeavor, so most people will probably never reach that level at anything. There's much enjoyment and satisfaction to be had in doing things for their own sake rather than comparing yourself to others.

I've found three things to help motivate myself in endeavors such as this:

1) recognize that if you really want to be good at it, it will take time and consistent, proper work at it (see deliberate practice).

2) maybe you don't have to be the best; you might be able to muster something that is good enough and that would still be of value to others (by definition, if it's good enough).

3) you're doing it for yourself.

Most of the world's great ideas came from doing something that seemed derivative or insignificant at first. Very few came from waiting for a huge, original idea to strike like a lightning bolt.

This fact surprises many people, because popular reporting of science and invention usually attributes ideas to some instant flash of insight, skipping over the hard work that led to it.

Substitute math by programming, and it becomes easy to see the pitfalls of CS's current "portfolio" paradigm.

Maybe you spend too much time on the Internet checking out what others are doing. Spend enough time and you will find someone who's doing it 10x or 100x better than you.

I can guarantee though that if you keep doing it with focus & dedication, ultimately it's going to work out.

It's why I like computing. There are still thousands of app you could write better.

We all have to start from scratch. Imperfection is what makes it yours.