“No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.” — Robert McKee, Story

In a time where we’re constantly pushed to our limits, margin is the rare space between our loads and limits. Author Richard Swenson writes on his website, margin is “related to our reserves and resilience. It is a buffer, a leeway, a gap; the place we go to heal, to relate, to reflect, to recharge our batteries, to focus on the things that matter most.”

To many people, margin sounds like a luxury.

To creatives and people who think for a living — writers, leaders, entrepreneurs, marketers, developers, designers, engineers — margin is essential.

Creative work is tough. In many cases, you completely dispose of an idea because it just isn’t good enough. Or, it makes sense, but doesn’t fit a business case. Or, you have other priorities and decide it’s not the right time for it. In any case, no matter how in love you are with your ideas, you must kill your darlings.

Here’s why margin is essential for sustainable, and excellent, creative work:

Buffer Time to Produce High Quantities

There’s an unbelievable amount of unused work that comes as a byproduct of the creative process. It’s inevitable. Author and essayist Tim Kreider explains it best, “Because the essence of creativity is fucking around; art is that which is done for the hell of it.”

You are experimenting, and you probably don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

Even if some of your ideas never see the light of day, going through the creative process is still valuable. As Eminem says in an interview with the New York Times, “I have a thinking job. I write a lot of things down, and sometimes I never use them. It’s just the exercise.”

Some creatives deliberately leverage quantity. Noel Gallagher says in an interview with Rolling Stone:

I still think tomorrow might be the day that I write the greatest song of all time. It’s like going fishing. The guitar is your fishing rod, and if I’m not fishing for that song, fucking Bono will get it, and if he’s not, Chris Martin will. And fuck those two guys, because they’ve got enough. We’re all fishing in the same river, and it’s cutthroat, baby.

Similarly, John Legend says in a Reddit AMA:

When I’m writing the album, I like to schedule writing sessions rather than just hope inspiration randomly comes to me. I like to schedule my creativity so that I’m more proactive about searching for inspiration. It makes me more productive and prolific. Every song won’t be great, but I create 50–80 songs every album, in the hopes that a significant portion will be great.

Even when Kanye says in this VICE clip that he would rather spend more time focusing on 14 tracks rather than spreading them across 40, there’s still a lot of effort that goes into early unused versions or drafts of each song.

Robert McKee writes in Story, “But if you know the craft, you know how to cure clichés: Sketch a list of five, ten, fifteen different “East Side lovers meet” scenes. Why? Because experienced writers never trust so-called inspiration.”

Creatives produce high amounts of work. There’s an unbelievable amount of work that the world never sees. Some people deliberately hide their brushstrokes.

Broadening the gap between your workload and your limit means you have time and energy to produce more than you expected. It also enables you to take a break and renew yourself for the day after.