Life advice nobody told you: Violent consistency is the only path to achieve what you want. It's not going to be pretty. It's not going to draw oohs and aahs from the crowd. Because it looks messy in the days. It's getting out of bed when you don't want to. It's sitting down at your desk when you're tired. It's pounding your head into a wall one more time. It's ugly. It's unimpressive. But it works. Quantity is a necessary precursor to quality. You cannot create once and hope for it to be perfect. You have to create a lot. Every single day. I recently came across a story in Art & Fear that I love: A ceramics teacher split a class into two groups. One would be graded on the quantity of their output, the other would be graded on the quality of their output. On the final day, the first group would have their total output of pots weighed, while the second group would have one pot judged. When grading day arrived, something fascinating happened: "The works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the 'quality' group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay." Quality is a byproduct of quantity. Violent consistency. That's the real recipe.