Creativity

Creators pay with effort. They put in the work to create a product in the hopes the audience consumes and engages with it. Audience members, on the other side of this interaction, pay for this effort with attention.

Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone:

• Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read

... See more