"Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better." --John Carmack
"Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things
together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection. Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and
just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better." - John Carmack
JC is technically brilliant but in other aspects of intelligence has been questionable. This interesting quote is a classic example of a Yogi Berraism. Claiming you can rush creativity, you just need to have the time to rewrite your complex code 2 or 3 times.
His claim is that doing a ton of really hard work repeatedly is still a lot faster and more reliable than waiting under the apple tree for a flash of inspiration.
The flash-of-inspiration mode of creativity has been dramatized so much that most of the population assumes that's just how it's done. It also seems way easier than hard work, so people want it to be true when they try to be creative. Simultaneously, it seems way less attainable than plain old hard work (the requirements seem to be mostly circumstance), so people also want it to be true when they are not trying to be creative ("My great idea just hasn't come to me yet!").
JC is reminding us of the hard truth: the reality behind the stories is that creativity is the prize of determination, not serendipity.
I would contend being under the apple tree is how it's done. Even for JC. Easy for him to say the contrary, when his business was always largely handled by others as a byproduct of him also being at the right-place at the right-time. This is why he's known to shut the door and hide. He didn't have to be a busy-body handling the day to day operations of id Software. It's the reason he was able to sit thinking about 2-3 shadow volume techniques, and the time to implement and test them all.
If that's not the 'apple tree' of software development, I don't know what is.
I'd bet my life that if you have no time to sit and think, just a busy-body answering phone calls, emails, you're not coming up ideas. At one point JC did sit and think, hard. Then he implemented hard.
Through the whole process he had isolation, so he really was 'under the apple tree'. Irregardless if his process involved building prototypes of his various ideas.
Maybe on details, but we disagree that you can rush creativity or genius. His trial-and-error method got him shadow volume years after a separate pair of engineers discovered it. This is why most great discoveries are done in research environments with teams.
He in my view, failed to see that he just filled his 'apple tree' time with tinkering. Some people plant a garden while thinking about code, or focus intently. I'm not sure there's much difference between methods, it depends on the field and person.
The most complex fields, involving what I'd consider true genius cannot be tested. It's just too general of a statement, and only relevant to him or a portion of the population.
But this is Carmack as I've always seen him. Technically brilliant, missing the big picture (his games were in some cases restricted simply to show off a technical feature eg. the Doom 3 flashlight), and fairly narrow minded.
Are there other indications this is the hard truth? It could turn out to be just one genius' creative process, where others do "idle under the apple tree". I believe Feynman's results about quantum theory did stem from idling and meddling with some non-interesting work, before the revelation dawned on him.
