Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work

creativity, you’ll eventually face up to the fact that edge dis-

comfort is a part of your life. You’ll need to be okay with that.

You don’t want to learn to stretch painlessly. You want to learn

to accept the discomfort of an edge as a condition of your

work, a sign that you’re doing it well. Resistance training is

another example. Some weightlifting exercises require working

to the point of failure; while the weight or number of repeti-

tions to failure may vary, working to failure is always just that,

and it always hurts. Learning your edges doesn’t mean that you

somehow “conquer” or “overcome” edge discomfort.

Conquering, overcoming, and other kinds ...