Any creative endeavor is highly non-linear, but the sharing of it almost always skips a lot of the actual work that goes into it. That’s ok; a clear progression makes for a good story that’s easy to tell. But don’t judge your reality against someone else’s compressed work
This is something I needed to be reminded of on a daily basis. I see great writers like John Gruber and Shawn Blanc cranking out awesome stuff. I see devs and designers like Marco Arment and Greg Wohlwend cranking out awesome stuff. And I start comparing myself. I look at my process and see how messy and shitty it is and how it doesn’t compare to their results. People who do great work do a lot of hard messy work first. If you want to do great work, just do work, power through that hard shitty stuff and get better.