ranjit I don't think it's that simple when it comes to very high levels in creative domains. Tiffany Poon quit her Masters program at Yale and went her own way, for instance. It gets very subjective after a point. The difference from athletes and scientists at high levels is this subjectivity imo. The strategies that work for sports and even academics are more objective, because they are not "art".
We'll have to disagree on this, I think. FWIW, Tiffany Poon quitting any school program is at best tangential to what I'm talking about, and I'm not sure where "strategies" comes into this. When I wrote:
Ithaca I have yet to meet a person who would not benefit from these types of insights from other people, with the caveat that it has to happen at the right time; too early in the creative process and it can have a derailing effect. The trick is to find the right observers/advisors for where you are in your development.
I was particularly thinking of people who are long past being in school (some in their eighties), and who are often considered masters in their fields. (One of these is a sculptor with a focus on large-scale abstract work, which is arguably no less subjective than music.) Other people come and sit at their feet to learn and observe, not so much the other way around. And yet, these masters...at some point, they talk to other people, they show their peers (and sometimes me, though I'm not a peer at all) what they're working on, and they see how people respond. They listen to what people say. Sometimes what they hear makes them think of something they hadn't considered before, and sometimes they discard everything they've heard. They've matured enough that they've developed a sense of when it's time to take the lid off their creative fermentation and allow observation to occur and they know how to value (or not) those observations to further their work and art.
