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Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.
居于学科前沿，也会令你暴露于众人视线中，易受攻击。卓越会招致批评，甚至往往是恶毒攻击。艺术家倾注多年心血终于完成一件雕塑作品，科学家皓首穷年提出一种理论，到头来若是无人问津，这种打击无疑是灾难性的。
Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.
对于富有创意的个体而言，最难以忍受的事情莫过于由于某种原因而无法工作的那种失落感和空虚感。如果一个人自觉创意枯竭，或许就更加痛苦不堪了。
Yet when a person is working in the area of his or her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of happiness. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles; economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities; and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.
而当一个人在自己擅长的领域里工作时，他的一切担心和忧虑都会消失，取而代之的是一种愉悦感。也许最重要的品质，在一切富有创意的人身上最常见的一种品质，就是能够享受创造过程本身。没有这种品质，诗人将不再追求完美而写些商业性的喧嚣之作；经济学家将会去银行任职，收人至少会是大学里的两倍；物理学家也会停止基础研究而加人工业实验室，那里条件优越而且结果也容易预测。
