Brilliance is rare enough that good and neat is a sufficient bar

Most people who feel they need to make something exceptional, an exceptional product, an exceptional discovery, are optimizing for the wrong threshold. Brilliance is rare. Most people won't hit it in any field, in their entire life, no matter how hard they try. Treating it as the bar you need to clear before your work counts guarantees most work never counts.

Steven picked this up recently and unexpectedly, painting Warhammer figures. A more experienced painter told him: "It's not important to be good at first, just try to be neat." That stuck, because it names a lower and much more achievable target. Neatness isn't talent, it's just consistency and the discipline to limit mistakes: clean edges, even coats, nothing sloppy. You don't need brilliance to be neat, and neat, sustained over time, is what most good work actually looks like from the outside.

So the real bar isn't exceptional, it's good and clean. Limiting mistakes gets you further, more reliably, than chasing a discovery or a masterpiece that was never a realistic target for most people to begin with.

Source claim: Since brilliance is rare in any field, aiming to be good and neat, and simply limiting mistakes, is a sufficient and realistic bar for most work.