How do the most prolific people produce so much?

I accidentally published twice on Monday (sorry, human error!)—so paid subscribers got my essay and video about J.S. Mill and the deeper springs of human character early. I was therefore going to take a pause today, but that didn’t seem right for a post about productivity… Here are four ideas I have long nurtured as suspicions for what makes the most productive people quite so successful, inspired by a recent conversation I had that I’m hoping to bring to you soon. Many people will have aspects of more than one of these criteria—Beethoven, for example. Instability. Think of the most prolific writers—D.H. Lawrence (seventy-five volumes), Charles Dickens (thirty volumes), Samuel Johnson (twenty-three volumes, plus a whole dictionary and edition of Shakespeare)—and you think of people who are, in some way, mentally unsettled. The recent Joyce Carol Oates profile reinforced this to me. And I learned that Gwern thinks partial mood disorder is behind some people’s productivity. Death (and Go

I accidentally published twice on Monday (sorry, human error!)—so paid subscribers got my essay and video about J.S. Mill and the deeper springs of human character early. I was therefore going to take a pause today, but that didn’t seem right for a post about productivity… Here are four ideas I have long nurtured as suspicions for what makes the most productive people quite so successful, inspired by a recent conversation I had that I’m hoping to bring to you soon. Many people will have aspects of more than one of these criteria—Beethoven, for example. Instability. Think of the most prolific w