Most of the work we do is invisible.
My wife, a very talented actress, is currently preparing for a one-woman show. Nobody is going to see the hours and hours and hours of memorization work and creative effort she’s doing to prepare for the upcoming performances. It’s invisible.
Authors usually don’t just write the words that show up in a completed novel. They write hundreds of thousands of words that are never seen. If they didn’t do it for their most recent novel, you can bet they wrote earlier books that never saw the light of day.
The same is true for most creative work.
I got to see a great example of this when I worked as a programmer on a Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) called LEGO Universe. About 90% of the work we did never made it into the game! The ideas were worked and reworked over and over. The designs, artwork, and code were tested and sometimes thrown out. They were improved day by day during the lifetime of the project.
I started teaching physics in the year 1995. Some of my students watched me solving physics problems and said I made it look easy. The reason it looked easy is because I had already been solving lots and lots of physics problems for over ten years. My students didn’t see the hours and hours I struggled to solve one problem after another in high school, college, and graduate school. They didn’t see the hours I spent preparing each lecture I gave.
Most of the work we do is invisible.
Because we don’t see the invisible work that leads other people to a certain level of success, we often don’t appreciate the level of effort that’s needed to make something difficult look easy.
People want to believe that “overnight success” is possible. They don’t want to acknowledge the ten or twenty years of grueling effort that happened before a given “overnight success” story.
Doing creative work is never easy.
Don’t make the mistake of expecting it to be easy. If you want to gain the skills required, you’ve got to put in the time and effort. Expect to spend years practicing your craft.
Do it because you enjoy the journey.
Acknowledge the reality of needing to do a lot of invisible work.
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