[TheOtherHobbes]

The pot story is only valid if learning happens.

You can make the same very bad $creative_product every day indefinitely without improving at all.

Which is why there has to be at least some assessment and feedback. That's the big benefit of having a teacher, mentor, and/or the feedback of peers, customers, or an audience.

If you have a mediocre talent they'll steer you towards making the most of it. If you have exceptional talent their feedback may be wrong or misleading, but it should at least make you think more deeply about your relationship with what you're doing.

You can't assess your own work realistically unless you have something to compare it with, and the critical skills to understand which features matter.

[brobdingnagians]

And in relation to programming, entrepreneurship, etc. getting basic experience doing "the full pipline" matters. Releasing _anything_ gives you experience in preparing _something_ for release, whereas if you tried making a perfect program you would miss out on what matters early on for an eventual release and be able to coordinate those for your next product.