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Comment by soft_dev_person | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is so important to communicate. I think "waiting for inspiration" is a bad approach and bad advice for anyone who want to do something professionally. Unless you are inspired 20-40 hours per week, only hobbyists have the luxury of waiting for inspiration.

Also, how will you ever improve in something if you only do it while inspired? And how will your inspired work be any good if you have no practice and experience to build upon?

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The main thing is that getting 4 masterpieces is extremely likely if you produce 10,000 works, and next to impossible if you produce only 4.

Also, you (hopefully!) learned something while failing at those 9994 attempts that you fed into the 4.

> The main thing is that getting 4 masterpieces is extremely likely if you produce 10,000 works

Yes and no. Once you succeeded in creating a masterpiece it can become incredibly hard to ever create something worthwhile again because success (especially when rewarded by the markets) can screw up your mind for good. You loose your sense of wonder, you feel the pressure to have success again and so on. It could very well be that you just create more of the same or get worse due to this. I think bands that are considered one hit wonders might provide a good example.

It's a bit like an optimization algorithm that found a local optimum but can't escape its current neighborhood.

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