Preliminary work is the beginning of creative abundance

When you believe you only have a handful of good creative ideas, and that they need to come out perfectly, you’re experiencing creative scarcity. The direct pursuit of perfection leads to destruction. Stop saving the good stuff, it will expire. The first step away from creative scarcity is to loosen up. When you’re loose enough, you experience creative abundance: you feel light-hearted, free to create and play and take creative risks. Interesting work comes as a byproduct of this process. Recording artists make demos. Visual artists make sketches. Writers make drafts. These are all examples of preliminary work, the early stage of loosening up and making something new. Preliminary work isn’t the most visible process, but it’s at the foundation of every good piece of work. Here’s how it sounds when it’s directionally correct, Bryant Wolf says: “Jamming with [my friend] Jon, I saw abundance. We could write so many songs. Sure, most of them don’t stand out, but the path to writing a great…

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