Art & Creativity Quote by John Tesh

Creativity doesn’t usually die from a lack of talent; it dies in the board meeting you hold inside your own head. John Tesh’s line lands because it treats self-doubt less like an emotion and more like a sales pitch you accidentally accept. The imagined objections - “no one will buy it,” “it won’t be any good” - aren’t craft notes. They’re market forecasts and preemptive reviews, the two easiest weapons for talking yourself out of the vulnerable, messy middle where art actually gets made.

Coming from a musician who built a career across formats (radio-friendly hits, TV themes, easy-listening empire), Tesh is speaking from a world where “Will it sell?” is always humming in the background. That’s the context that sharpens the warning: commercial logic is useful after the work exists, but corrosive when it becomes the gatekeeper to starting. He’s not romanticizing risk as chaos; he’s describing risk as the admission fee to originality. If you only attempt what already feels validated, you’ll produce competent replicas and call it practicality.

The subtext is almost therapeutic: your inner critic isn’t a truth-teller, it’s a risk manager. It frames fear as prudence because prudence sounds adult. Tesh punctures that disguise. The intent is to unmask the real choice behind “maybe later”: not between success and failure, but between creating something that might matter and choosing the safer comfort of never finding out.