This is an interesting, and I think correct way of thinking about creative potential for about half of us, for whom it’s entirely about the content. It’s a finite number of ideas we’re capable of having and caring about enough to pursue. I think I’m in this group.

But for the other half of people I think of as process or craft-oriented, there is potentially no limit. They can keep producing till they die at a rate that’s only limited by physical energy decline. Eg. Clint Eastwood. He keeps making the same sorts of movies I don’t really enjoy, but seem good for their type. He never really levels up. I have almost no friends I’d put in this category, either producers or consumers. I don’t dislike such people, but I have nothing to say to them, or they to me.

For the content tribe, there is an interesting tension that behaves like supply-demand: ideas you’re capable of having inevitably increase in difficulty and ambition, but your ability to execute declines, including mustering the boldness and originality required to animate and “solve” the idea (an idea is like a problem statement when you first have it — not just assembly required, but creative invention). It’s like a rising ambition “supply” curve of ideas crosses a falling capability “demand” curve of execution hunger. Productivity on the x axis instead of quantity, and idea difficulty on y axis instead of price. Your brain’s internal idea-execution market potentially “clears” at the intersection point. You are dissatisfied/unchallenged by your work to the left, and defeated by it to the right. You phone it in on the left, have more false starts or non-starts on the right. Your threshold of care is a straight horizontal line that rises with age, and you don’t enjoy working on stuff below it. When it rises above the intersection, you can no longer be peak-productive. Dumb luck drives actual productivity: Ideas that are above your threshold, and above your capability too, but for some lucky reason you see a way to execute. The yield rate of this luck goes down as the threshold rises. Integrate that yield over time-to-live and that’s the number of works you have left to look forward to.

Things you could continue to do at old levels of difficulty, even with declining capacity, are no longer exciting enough to care about.

I saw someone on Twitter recently comment that 2011-12 was my “great” year and they find me unreadable now. That was my “market clearing” year. I think I could still write like I did then, though the physical strain would be higher. I just don’t want to anymore (plus the audience for that kind of writing is mostly 10s-nostalgia driven rather than live-care driven, which I don’t care to cater to). And things I want to write are increasingly beyond me. The usable yield of ideas I see an attack for, and successful conversion rate for attempts, are both going down. Idea reach >> idea grasp, and the gap is creeping up.

This is one reason I increasingly enjoy prompting younger and higher raw-talent writers (and AIs) with ideas I can’t pull off myself (and never could in many cases).