¶ The Risky Nature of Creativity
as long as the entity keeps functioning because if you're creative and you go off on tangents all the time There's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time, and you're going to become hyper-successful as a consequence. But there's much more probability that... Even though some of your ideas might be highly valuable, the probability that this is the right time and place for them is extraordinarily low.
So to produce a successful creative product, for example, in the marketplace, you need a ridiculous combination of creativity, so that you keep generating ideas, and then... a network around you of people who have skills that you don't and then the production of a product, let's say, whatever that happens to be, that's actually in demand by the marketplace at exactly that moment.
And that someone else hasn't already done better. So the sensible thing to tell anybody who wants to be creative is, that's stupid. You shouldn't do it. Your probability of success is so low that... it's better just to do something sensible. But the problem with that is that creative people can't do that because they're creative. And if they shut down their creativity, it's like an extrovert who's going to live in an isolated cell.
A creative person who isn't being creative, they just wither and die. So they're stuck with it. But it is a high-risk, high-return strategy.
¶ Sustainable Approach for Creative People
Probably better if you want to be creative, or if you are, and you should take this advice to heart because I've been watching people for a long time. If you want to engage in a creative pursuit, you should find something stable to do that will generate you an income.
and you should pursue the thing that you're creative about on the side, because monetizing creative production is so bloody difficult that, especially now, like, especially in, like, artistic domains, generation of music and that sort of thing, it's like, you just have no... how many million songs there are on the internet and the vast majority of them commercially available get downloaded zero times
I think there's 80 million songs or something like that on the net. And I believe it's something in the neighborhood of 70 million get downloaded zero times. And then there's a hundred that can... get downloaded like 350 million times. And so those people are wildly successful and everyone else collapses in...