You Might Want to Try Being Less Creative

The author realized that excessive creativity and originality anxiety prevented them from finishing songs as a teenager. Through a jam session with a musician friend, they discovered that borrowing liberally from existing songs, using common structures, and treating early work as sketches actually enables better creative output than trying to be entirely original. The shift from a scarcity mindset to abundance—recognizing that great work emerges through many mediocre attempts—proved more productive than perfectionism.