I enjoyed Eddie Smith’s post The color of creativity:

The process of creativity isn’t glamorous. It’s simply about hard work, the management of emotions, and delayed showmanship. And it’s necessarily lonely. To want to be creative — truly creative — is to want to entertain, which is often depressingly opposite of being entertained. 

Real creativity is the dull and failure-fraught art of giving people things they never asked for.

The phrase “delayed showmanship” immediately jumped out at me. I think that’s something none of us are naturally very good at.