There is a story about Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen that has become almost mythical among fans of both men. It was the mid-eighties. They were both in Paris. Dylan had played a concert the night before, and the two of them were having coffee.

Dylan asked Cohen how long it had taken him to write Hallelujah. Cohen told him a couple of years. He later admitted this was a lie. It had taken five.

Cohen wrote more than eighty draft verses of Hallelujah. He filled notebooks. He agonised over it. He once described being in the Royalton Hotel in New York, on the carpet in his underwear, banging his head on the floor and saying, “I can’t finish this song.”

Then Cohen asked Dylan how long it had taken him to write I and I, a song Cohen loved. Dylan said fifteen minutes.

This exchange speaks to me and calls out something that I have been struggling with. Not because it proves anything simple about either man. Dylan was not merely effortless. Cohen was not merely tortured. Both were great artists. Both worked seriously. Both had gifts beyond explanation.

But the story names something we rarely admit about creative work. Some people seem to receive the thing whole. The rest of us have to wrestle it down. Sentence by sentence. Verse by verse. Year by year.

Rather than flow, there's a whole lot of friction

The economist David Galenson made a useful distinction in his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses. He argued that there are two broad kinds of creative lives.

There are conceptual innovators. They tend to know early what they want to do. They work from clear ideas. Their breakthroughs often arrive young. They are confident enough to break with the past because they can already see the future in their heads.

In the art world, Picasso is the obvious example. “I don’t seek,” he said. “I find.”

Conceptuals are the ones history most often calls “geniuses”. They are irreverent toward tradition, and their best work often comes early. Their ideas arrive in flashes of inspiration, acted on quickly and communicated with confidence. Picasso was 26 when he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, launching Cubism. Dylan was 24 when he wrote Like a Rolling Stone, later ranked number one by Rolling Stone magazine in their poll of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

Then there are experimental innovators.

They do not begin with certainty. They begin with a question, or an ache, or a vague sense that something is not yet right. Their work develops slowly. They revise. They return. They circle the thing for years.

Here, Cézanne is the obvious example. “I seek in painting,” he said. Cohen was 50 when he finished and recorded Hallelujah. It took another 20 years, through covers by John Cale, Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright (and even Shrek), before the song entered the cultural mainstream. His first number one album came in 2012, at age 77. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010.

For The Seekers

The distinction is useful, but only up to a point. Because most of us are not trying to become Picasso or Cézanne, Dylan or Cohen. We are trying to make something honest with the materials of our own life. An essay. A business. A workshop. A relationship. A piece of work that feels like it has some truth in it. We are trying to bring something into the world without knowing, at the beginning, whether it will work.

And this is where the mythology of creativity can be one sided, even cruel. We have built a culture around the finder. The person who seems to know. The person who arrives early and appears to have been born with a clean sense of direction. We recognise that kind of confidence almost immediately because it photographs well. It pitches well. It raises money well. It gives a good interview.

The seeker is harder to recognise. The seeker looks less impressive from the outside. They hesitate. They revise. They circle the same idea for months or years. They write drafts that embarrass them. They start again. They pull at a thread without knowing whether it will become anything. They cannot always explain what they are doing because part of the work is finding out what the work even is.

That can feel like failure, especially in a world that keeps rewarding speed. The overnight success that was not overnight, but is told that way because that is what the mythology expects

You see this in business and entrepreneurship all the time. We have an almost religious attachment to the young founder who sees the future before everyone else. Sometimes that story is true. But it has taken up too much room in our collective imagination

There are other ways to build. There are people who come to their work later. People who need years of frustration before they can name what they are really trying to do. People who become original not by rejecting everything that came before them, but by paying attention for long enough to notice what others have missed. People whose confidence is not the starting point, but the consequence of staying with the work.

You cannot despise the way the work comes to you. If you are not graced with flow, friction may be the gift you have been given. It forces you to listen more carefully. It slows you down enough to notice what the confident version of you might have missed. It keeps you close to the material. It makes you less interested in sounding impressive and more interested in getting closer to what is true.

The work that takes longer is not automatically better. But neither is it lesser because it took longer. Some things arrive quickly because they are clear. Some things arrive slowly because they are deep. Some things need to pass through more of your life before they can be said properly.

So many people abandon their work too early. Not because the work is dead, but because it does not resemble the story they were told about creativity. It does not feel effortless. It does not arrive with certainty. It does not make them look brilliant straight away. So they assume they are not built for it.

But maybe they are built for the other road. The slower one. The road of drafts, false starts, private humiliations, small discoveries and a stubborn obedience to something you cannot fully explain. That road counts too.

Some people find. Some people seek. And if you are a seeker, the work may ask more of you than you wanted to give. It may take years. It may require you to keep faith with something that gives you very little encouragement in return. It may leave you on the floor, metaphorically or otherwise, wondering why the thing will not finish itself. But that does not mean the work is failing. 

Hallelujah took years. Keep going.

NEW PODCAST ALERT

In this episode, of the Finding Meaning in Work Podcast, I speak with Suji Sanjeevan, the co founder of BrandScent and Light and Glow

We talked about…

About Suji

Suji Sanjeevan is a fragrance innovator, entrepreneur and co founder of Light and Glo and BrandScent, where science, psychology and storytelling collide to create brands people genuinely remember. With a clinical background and an instinct for consumer behaviour, she has built businesses that challenge the traditional idea of fragrance, transforming scent from a product into a strategic brand tool.

What began at a dining table evolved into national retail, global conversations and partnerships spanning retail, sport, hospitality and corporate. From boardrooms to stadiums, Suji’s work sits at the intersection of emotion, memory and experience, proving that the most powerful brands are not always the loudest, they are the ones people feel.

Alongside entrepreneurship, Suji serves as Chair of the Victorian Small Business Ministerial Council, advocating for founders and the realities of modern business. She is passionate about helping early stage businesses think bigger, refine faster and build brands with real cut through