Guess what: None of us do. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.

Truly creative people work for work’s own sake, and if they make a public discovery or become famous that is a bonus.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess.

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.

Creative things happen to creative people, especially when they let themselves go to the Zen of the moment, when they don’t allow themselves to be paralyzed either by overthinking or by laziness.

creative people are always having ideas. That’s not the trick. The trick is learning how to capture them without being captured by them,

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

True creatives want their ideas to constantly be challenged

One of the best advertising people ever was Carl Ally. He said the true creative person wants to be a know-it-all. They want to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, modern manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and lean hog futures. Because they never know when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road, but they know it will happen.

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that 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, and 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. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. 'The rest of us just show up and get to work.

The secret of creative work is to make a lot and publish a little.

Don't underestimate the power of giving yourself permission to create junk. Most of what you create will be mediocre or bad.

But that's okay. You only have to show people the good stuff. Make 100 things, discard 90, and share the 10 best. Create, create, create. Edit, edit, edit.

Today people just go on working, working and working. Not because they are creating something fantastic, but simply because they have to work, otherwise they don’t know what to do with themselves.