What if the most productive hour of your day wasn’t spent at your desk, but was actually when you were washing a coffee mug or staring out the car window?

Most creators believe that if a day doesn’t produce something tangible, it doesn’t count. We scroll past other people’s highlights and compare our minor progress to their big breakthroughs.

We decide that another ordinary Wednesday means we’re falling behind or lacking talent. If nothing clicked, was shipped, or produced, we label the day a loss.

But that mentality underestimates how creative work actually happens.

If you zoom out far enough, your creative life never looks like a straight line of progress. It looks more like a hill.

The creative bell curve

Imagine your year shaped like a curve. In mathematics, this is called a bell curve. Here, it’s simply a way of mapping where your creative energy goes over time.

At the centre of the curve is your average day—the Boring Middle.

These days aren’t great or terrible. They’re where you spend most of your time, when life runs as expected. They’re filled with routines, maintenance, and average drafts. Nothing dramatic happens—but nothing falls apart either.

As you move away from the centre of the curve toward either side, days become more extreme—and much less common.

On the far left is The Storm. These are crisis days filled with burnout, loss, mistakes, and emergencies. On this side of the curve, creativity isn’t the priority. It’s about survival. These days feel overwhelming when you’re in them, but over the span of a year, they’re rare.

On the far right is The Peak. These are breakthrough days—finishing a project, an unexpected win, or a life-changing moment. They’re memorable precisely because they don’t happen often. You can’t live here, no matter how much the internet makes it seem that way.

Your year in numbers

In any given calendar year, your creative life follows a pattern even if it doesn’t feel like one while you’re living it.

When you zoom out, the chaos and thrill of wins, losses, and slow weeks start to look less random and more like a distribution. This isn’t because life is rigid, but because extremes are rare by nature.

A typical year might look something like this:

You don’t need to remember the math. The takeaway is simpler than it looks.

Most years aren’t made of dramatic highs and lows. They’re made of ordinary days with occasional events in either direction.

This matters because many creators expect their lives to exist on the right side of the curve more often than is possible. When it doesn’t, they assume something is wrong.

But the numbers tell a different story.

If your year feels mostly ordinary, with occasional highs and lows, you aren’t failing. You’re living the most common creative life there is.

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Where ideas really come from

There’s another reason the middle matters so much—one most productivity advice ignores.

Your brain does its best creative work when you aren’t forcing it.

When you’re doing simple, familiar tasks—washing dishes, driving, walking—your conscious mind stays occupied.

That creates the mental breathing room for your subconscious to work in the background, quietly connecting dots. Solutions start to surface without effort.

This is why ideas show up as shower thoughts instead of during a scheduled creative session. Your brain feels safe enough to wander.

  • When there’s too much chaos, you’re just trying to cope.
  • When there’s too much stimulation, you can’t hear yourself think.

The Boring Middle is where many ideas originate—long before you notice them.

Stuck in the middle

Of course, the Boring Middle doesn’t always feel peaceful. Sometimes it feels like stagnation. You look at a typical Wednesday and feel like you’re missing out as you circle the same idea for the tenth time.

On those days, it helps to remember how fragile the middle actually is.

It’s actually a massive victory of self-preservation. It only takes one phone call, one accident, or one piece of bad luck to push a normal day straight into a storm.

A day where nothing dramatic happens isn’t a failure. It’s a blessing. It’s stability.

And stability is what allows creative work to continue at all.

Think of the Boring Middle as the ground beneath your feet. No one celebrates it. No one posts about it. But without it, there’s really nothing to build on— there’s no thinking, no experimenting, no dreaming.

Life in the curve

If you find yourself in the thick of another standard weekday, a healthier way to view your creative life looks like this:

  • In the Middle: Practice patience. Don’t force the big idea. Trust that your subconscious is working.
  • At the Peaks: Show humility. Smell the roses while you can. Let it motivate you, but don’t expect it to last forever.
  • In the Storms: Give yourself grace. If the world is crumbling, your only job is to stabilise, not to be productive.

Every part of the curve exists for a reason. None of it is wasted. If nothing remarkable happened today, that doesn’t mean you fell behind.

It means the system is working.

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