I've lived to see the day where someone made an American Psycho business card reference and a follow up comment would - in context mind you - be able to reference Paul Allen as both the movie character and the Microsoft founder.
> Do you know of any painters that grind painting like you can grind exercise?
Do you think Leonardo got good enough to do the Sistine chapel by daubing a doodle or two when the mood took him?
You absolutely can and, to get good, must grind such things. Everyone knows this is true of musicianship; painting and writing are no different. (Maybe painters don't grind their technique as much nowadays as they once did, but the decline of technique in painting over time reflects that.)
As Picasso said: 'Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working'.
And maybe it's not either or, maybe when you're composing music or thinking about your new book or project you need to be in a creative state and that is very different from a grinding disciplined state that requires you to actually execute on your vision.
At that point, you no longer have to grind, because your brain has hardwired decision paths that are automatic and produce correct results for extremely complex problems like "is this character likeable and understandable by the reader", and you can effortlessly add a few high value paragraphs to their backstory. But it's foolhardy to think that level of "flow" can be achieved out of thin air, without writing hundreds of characters before them, re-reading them, getting feedback from other readers, studying other briliant authors with a eye for their technique etc.
I don't agree with the 10k hours bullshit popularized by Gladwell, google a bit about him and you will see he admitted that all his "non-fiction" books were actually insight porn more than teaching you anything useful. I liked his books too until I realized he just made up nice pop-culture stories and pretended to tell you the truth.
That said of course you have to have some level of practice and knowledge about whatever you want to create before you can be inspired to create something new. That doesn't mean you can be creative just because you've had practice. I remember Huberman and others talking about circadian rythms and how people are more creative at night, can't remember the exact reasons, might've been something about cortisol being lower then. I do believe cortisol levels are a hint as usually you are less creative on "uppers" like caffeine or adderall than you are without them because you always want to do things while on them and not actually think deeply about your problem.
You should really watch that video, it goes into great details, backed by scientific research, into how and when the 10,000 hours trope works and where it fails.
Creativity and skill are somewhat orthogonal, you can be an exceptionally well read and educated person yet never publish anything. But it's extremely unlikely you will create anything out of thin air without good technical skills. We like to to obsess about outliers like Beethoven, the deaf composer, but in reality the vast majority of famous musicians are recruited from accomplished instrumentalists.
It's the forum that frequent commenters on Slate Star Codex set up to chat while Slate Star Codex was on its NYT-induced hiatus. It seems to have developed a life of its own and is still in use even now that Slate Star Codex is back as Astral Codex Ten.
Dennett talks about this sort of thing in broad outline in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which is aimed at the layperson (though fairly dense and demanding). I'm not sure if it's mathematically detailed enough for what you seek, but it might be worth a look.
