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Comment by manholio | Hacker News Reader

"Vision" is what happens in your brain after you grind 10,000 hours on a skill that is improvable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA

At that point, you no longer have to grind, because your brain has hardwired decision paths that are automatic and produce correct results for extremely complex problems like "is this character likeable and understandable by the reader", and you can effortlessly add a few high value paragraphs to their backstory. But it's foolhardy to think that level of "flow" can be achieved out of thin air, without writing hundreds of characters before them, re-reading them, getting feedback from other readers, studying other briliant authors with a eye for their technique etc.

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I don't agree with the 10k hours bullshit popularized by Gladwell, google a bit about him and you will see he admitted that all his "non-fiction" books were actually insight porn more than teaching you anything useful. I liked his books too until I realized he just made up nice pop-culture stories and pretended to tell you the truth.

That said of course you have to have some level of practice and knowledge about whatever you want to create before you can be inspired to create something new. That doesn't mean you can be creative just because you've had practice. I remember Huberman and others talking about circadian rythms and how people are more creative at night, can't remember the exact reasons, might've been something about cortisol being lower then. I do believe cortisol levels are a hint as usually you are less creative on "uppers" like caffeine or adderall than you are without them because you always want to do things while on them and not actually think deeply about your problem.

You should really watch that video, it goes into great details, backed by scientific research, into how and when the 10,000 hours trope works and where it fails.

Creativity and skill are somewhat orthogonal, you can be an exceptionally well read and educated person yet never publish anything. But it's extremely unlikely you will create anything out of thin air without good technical skills. We like to to obsess about outliers like Beethoven, the deaf composer, but in reality the vast majority of famous musicians are recruited from accomplished instrumentalists.

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