Apart from all my other hobbies, I also have a very determined life goal to become a ‘Great’ writer (think Gabriel Garcia Marques, Hermann Hesse, Romain Gary or Mark Twain rather than JK Rowling..). Ambitious, I know. One of the things which you constantly have to fight against, as an amateur writer, is the sense of awe, of extreme greatness, when you read a book by a great master.

How can I possibly dream to write a book like Narziss & Goldmund or One Hundred Years of Solitude? How arrogant of me! These books are masterpieces. A young amateur like myself could never dream of writing such a piece, right?

Well, yes, right. It’s true that I have no hope whatsoever of giving birth to the Never Ending Story or even the Lord of the Rings as I am today. Should I give up because of that? Absolutely not!

Many books about writing put forward this very encouraging idea: every one of these Greats started where all writers started. Everyone has started by writing poor stories that gauchely attempted to imitate a writer they admired.

Reading the autobiographies of some of those authors is even more inspiring. Without exception, every famous writer spent years receiving rejection after rejection, being told by countless editors that their work was not worth publishing, not worth a penny. For each Nobel Prize winning author, you can imagine a mountain of rejection slips taller than he is - and you won’t be far from the amount of rejection that author has had to endure.

When you read a Book, a Masterpiece that slaps you across the face with its Greatness, you might be discouraged, thinking “I’ll never be able to do this”. The great lie, there, is that when you read one of these books, you’re reading a work that’s the culmination of a lifetime of efforts. You’re seeing the best of the best of the best of the work that this author (who likely had his share of genius to begin with) produced throughout his entire life. It’s no surprise that your first draft put together late at night yesterday seems pitiful in comparison.

The lesson to learn here is not to ignore those admirable human beings who have contributed to all our lives through their passion, their dedication and their greatness. The lesson is that each time you see one of these masterpieces (whether it is a book, a business, a song, or any other human creation), you’re seeing the tip of a mountain. And that tip is not floating in the air in isolation, it is supported by that mountain of work and toil and sweat and defeat.

Not everyone will get to the top of the mountain. The road is littered with people who gave up, but most of them gave up due to lack of perseverance rather than lack of inspiration, genius, or other such things. Keep trying, keep striving, keep reaching for the top of the mountain and you will go up, ineluctably, until you get perhaps not to the top of the highest mountain (Mozarts are few and far between, after all), but at least much higher than you could have dared when you began the journey.