Psychology Today published an interesting article about the aspects of creative thinking that we’re not usually taught in school. The overall point is that creativity is not some magical fairly dust sprinkled on a few special people who can create artistic masterpieces or brilliant inventions on the first try. It’s actually a lot of repetition, work, and practice, along with plenty of ambiguity, frustration, and failure. But realizing this is inspiring and gives hope. It means that if you believe you are creative, and you’re willing to put the work into it, you can be creative.

On the trial-and-error involved:

All creative geniuses work passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than by minor poets. Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music, including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses, during his short creative life. Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings and 2,000 drawings and Picasso executed more than 20,000 works. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were simply bad.

From a project management perspective, it helps explain why creatives and developers cringe when a project manager asks them how many hours it will take to come up with the perfect concept or solution. They can’t really tell you how many iterations it will require. The better question is, how much time do they have to do it in?