Creativity Quote by Steve Lacy

Innovation, in Steve Lacy's telling, isn’t a lightning bolt - it’s attrition. The line lands because it refuses the romance of originality and replaces it with a grittier truth musicians recognize immediately: newness is expensive, and the bill comes due in private moments where the work stops sounding like “vision” and starts sounding like failure.

Lacy’s phrasing is doing quiet psychological work. “If you’re trying” frames invention as a choice, not a gift. “A lot of discouraging points” makes doubt sound inevitable, even routine - not a sign you’re on the wrong path, but a feature of the terrain. Then he pivots to the real subject: “most people give up.” That isn’t contempt so much as a diagnosis of the system. Culture loves novelty, but it doesn’t subsidize the long stretch where novelty is indistinguishable from nonsense.

Context matters here. Lacy was a jazz musician who committed early to the soprano sax and to forms (like Monk’s compositions and his own angular writing) that didn’t flatter audiences on first listen. Jazz, especially the more exploratory corners Lacy inhabited, runs on apprenticeship, repetition, and public risk: you test ideas in rooms that can go cold fast. So “give up” isn’t abstract. It’s the moment you default back to licks that get applause, the gig that pays, the style that already has a market.

The subtext is a kind of austere encouragement: discouragement isn’t proof you can’t do it; it’s proof you’re actually doing it.