When I was trying to figure out how to get myself well after being diagnosed late in life with a form of cystic fibrosis, I intentionally chose to not join any online support groups for CF or otherwise expose myself overly much to conventional views of the problem. I did this because I was already doing better than I was supposed to be and so was my oldest son (who has the same thing) and I wanted to figure out what we were doing right and improve on it. I felt that listening overly much to the mantra that "people like you don't get well" would have put me in danger of believing such brain-washing and thereby helping it to become self-fulfilling prophecy. I also felt that listening overly much to the conventional framing of the problem would pollute my thinking and deny me the opportunity to come up with a more accurate/effective view of the problem. Einstein supposedly said something like "You cannot solve a problem from the level of consciousness that helped create it." So I didn't want to be immersed in or exposed too much to the thought processes of all those folks who believed the problem to be unresolvable. I felt clear thinking on the matter was my only hope of salvation. The pay-off was huge. (And I'm an extrovert, so this was not a particularly easy path for me to follow. Had my life not literally depended upon it, I don't think I would have pursued such a path with so much persistence.)
Not some kind of 'rebuttal'. Just talking.
Thanks.
My experience of working with creative people has been that many of them work very hard, yes, but many of them do so because they want to get the most out of their natural creativity and talent. To an observer, it looks like their gains are strictly a result of their hard work, but that's because we don't see that hidden multiplier that's scaling their efforts into ability.
I don't mean to imply with my last post that some people just aren't creative altogether when I said that some people have it and some people don't. I just mean people that people have it in different areas (programming, carpentry, painting, organization, conversation, etc), and if you don't have it in an area, you're probably not going to manifest it. You can try to mimic it with persistence though :)