If you’re interested in digging a ditch, a great strategy is to pick up a shovel, find a patch of ground, and start digging. When you have dug for long enough, hard enough, and with enough force, you’ll have a ditch. The longer and harder you work at digging, the bigger and deeper and wider that ditch will get.

We tend to think of many of our endeavors in the same way. If we go to our jobs five days a week, do the work assigned to us every day, sometimes put in a bit of overtime, and are very diligent about it, we’ll get ahead. If we practice a skill over and over for days, weeks, and even years, it will improve. You can learn languages through sheer hard work. You can build houses through learning the skills and putting in the back-breaking effort to raise scaffolding and plaster walls. You can code incredibly complex programs to solve problems.

However, with creative work, the effort we put in is often not enough. So often, we’re told that “showing up is half the battle,” and that those who continue to keep trying are the ones who “make it,” through sheer determination.

Dedication to craft and a willingness to endure is certainly part of the equation when pursuing creative work, but there are a lot of other factors at play that are completely out of our control. Inherent qualities about ourselves (the time period we’re born in, our physical appearance, our innate talent) and environmental factors (what’s trending at the time we’re creating art, what skills are valued at any given time) and other variables also have a huge impact on whether or not what we do is going to be recognized and celebrated.

While this can be frustrating and disheartening, it’s good to remember that being popular or well-received critically isn’t all there is to being creative. Making the work that speaks to us should be the driving force.

Otherwise, working hard to make something you don’t believe in isn’t going to be fulfilling in the end.