Making a stop-motion film takes thousands of tiny moves. Patience is a creative tool nobody brags about.

Nobody lists patience among their talents, and a surprising amount of good work depends on it entirely. Moving a puppet a millimetre, photographing it, moving it again, several thousand times, is not a test of imagination. It is a test of whether you can keep doing a dull thing accurately for a long time.

Pick something that needs repetition and do it in sittings you can sustain rather than one heroic push. Twenty frames a day, five sentences, one coat of paint. Keep a tally where you can see it, because seeing the count is most of what keeps patience possible.