Keep at it

Jack Kerouac’s first book took 3 years to write his first novel which was not a breakout success. His second book he wrote on a scroll in just three weeks. It was On The Road.

Picasso famously has his napkin story, when some lady recognized him and asked him to do a quick sketch for her. After a minute he handed her back the napkin and asked for a large sum of money and said how can you charge so much for something that only took you five minutes. He said my dear you're wrong it took me forty years to do this in five minutes.

It took Einstein a decade of working on general relativity and most of that decade was spent stuck, chasing a wrong stuff that he later had to abandon. Then he found out another mathematician was closing in on the same equations, and Einstein raced him and submitted four papers and arrived at the correct field equations in single month.

And then there is Nietzsche. In Twilight of the Idols he writes that for any aesthetic act, creating or even perceiving art, one physiological state has to be present first: “Rausch.” Frenzy, intoxication. This is the foundation. The heightened excited state. Without it, there’s no creation. It is a state that the body enters, not a mood you choose. He wrote Twilight of the Idols itself in about a week during his final sane year, which was a period of extraordinary output where he produced four major works in rapid succession before mentally collapsing.

Your first might be your worst and the thing you spent months or years working on might be dwarfed by what you produce in a few days.

But you can’t force frenzy. Sometimes a slow boring unglamorous stretch right precludes the breakthrough. In fact that might be the only known way there.

Keep at it