The rapper’s debut album is usually his ninth notebook. You only heard the one with a label on it.

What reaches you is the visible end of a long invisible stretch, and the invisible part is where nearly all the work happened. Comparing your early attempts with somebody’s released version compares two different stages and calls the gap a difference in ability. The notebooks exist for everyone, they just do not get published.

Keep going through the part nobody sees, and stop measuring drafts against finished things. Count attempts rather than results for a while. Whatever you are making now is far more likely to be a notebook than a debut, and that is the right place to be.