Behind every clean final product is a studio floor covered in failed attempts.

Anything that looks effortless has been filtered. What you see is the survivor of a great many attempts that went nowhere, and none of those get shown, so the real ratio stays invisible from outside the room. Setting your pile of failures beside someone else’s single clean result is comparing an entire process to a highlight.

Count your discards instead of hiding them. When something fails, save it in a folder named for exactly that. The folder getting fat is the actual evidence that you are working.