When you can't sleep at night, whack on some Chopin. That's what I do. Let the notes wash over you. Each piece feels like perfection - as though it emerged fully formed with tangibly divine inspiration.
But I know that isn't true. You might too, although the reality might still shock you. I'll tell you something interesting:
Take the top 250 composers in history who have contributed at least one work of lasting fame. Put all their combined works in a room. A library of incredible work. Do you want to guess what the distribution of effort is among the greats? How much was contributed, and by whom?
Imagine yourself in that library now, looking at all the great works from all 250 composers. Now realise that half of all those works were created by only 16 people. A small fraction. But look closer and the disparity gets more dramatic. Of all the great works in this library, fully 75% - three quarters of the entire output in classical music across all of human history - was produced by just 35 of these 250 composers.
Now consider this: those prolific few didn't just create more masterpieces. They also created more failures, more forgotten pieces, more works that never stood the test of time. Mozart composed over 600 works. Beethoven, around 700. Bach? Over 1,000.
The secret isn't that masters produce only great work. It's that masters produce more.
This pattern appears across virtually every creative field. In science, a small percentage of scientists produce the majority of published papers. In art, the most celebrated painters were often the most prolific. In business, serial entrepreneurs start many more ventures than those who build just one.
Dean Keith Simonton, a creativity researcher, discovered this pattern and called it the "equal odds rule." The ratio of hits to total attempts stays roughly the same across a career. The way to produce more great work isn't to become more selective - it's to produce more work, period.
Think about what this means for you. We often romanticise creativity, imagining that the greats sat around waiting for lightning to strike. But the data tells a different story. The greats showed up every day. They wrote, composed, painted, experimented - relentlessly. And in doing so, they produced both their worst and their best work.
The lesson? If you want to create something great, create a lot. Don't wait for inspiration. Don't polish one piece endlessly. Instead, ship more. Write more. Build more. The math is on your side: the more you create, the more likely you are to create something that matters.
Shakespeare wrote 37 plays. Some are masterpieces that have endured for centuries. Others? Largely forgotten. But he had to write all 37 to discover which ones would resonate across time.
Picasso created an estimated 50,000 works of art. Most people can name maybe a dozen. But without the other 49,988, the famous ones might never have existed.
So the next time you feel paralysed by the desire to create something perfect, remember the maths. The odds of any single piece being your best work are low. But the odds of your next piece being better than your last? Much higher than you think.
Don't aim for masterpieces. Aim for volume. The masterpieces will find you.
Don't wait.
Don't overthink.
Just make more.
