Ask to see your favorite artist’s early stuff. It’s usually rough, and that’s the best news you’ll get all week.

You are comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle. Early work from people you admire is almost always clumsy, derivative and visibly uncertain, which is not a secret so much as something nobody bothers to show you. The gap turns out to be time and volume rather than a different kind of person.

Go looking for the earliest work you can find by someone whose output you love. Their first demos, their student film, the stuff from before anyone knew them. Then look at your own current work next to it rather than next to their best.