What is the downside of success? The inevitability of future failures. Does this anxiety loom far more strongly over artists/creators of all sorts—including sport, which is after all, a performance art? Evidently. For one, the highs of creative success are dizzy. Two, that supposed magic, regardless of all the work you put in, fails to produce the same results, forever—or even beyond a short period of time, when you mystically shone. After the unexpected, unprecedented success of her non-fiction travelogue Eat, Pray, Love (2006), writer Elizabeth Gilbert had to contend with the possibility of her best work being already behind her.

She had only touched 40, with as many years left to go. And she'd been writing for 25 years before that. Struck by the 'curse of the bestseller', Gilbert sat down to decode creativity instead. Or how it unnecessarily debilitated the artist, while it was only with the Renaissance, that the individual had been placed at the centre of creativity in the first place—producing pressure of (being a) "genius", that had (literally) been killing artists, for over 500 years! In her brilliant 2009 TED talk, Gilbert bore out how the greatness of her work (let alone its reception) wasn't quite a personal triumph, and that she just ought to chill, and chiefly show up to work regardless (simply honouring her part of the deal). Humans had always considered "creativity as a divine, attendant spirit that came to human beings—from a distant, noble source; and for distant, noble reasons."