Output is the goal. Not perfection, not an audience — just making something.
Creative output is blocked primarily by judgment — usually self-judgment applied before the work is done. The internal critic that evaluates the idea before it exists, compares the first draft to finished work by people who've been doing this for years, or dismisses the impulse to make something because 'it's not good enough.' This is the most common reason people who want to create don't. The work gets killed before it starts.
The solution isn't to lower your standards. It's to separate the generative phase from the evaluative phase. Good makers in every discipline know this: you draft, then you edit. You brainstorm, then you select. You shoot, then you cut. During the generative phase, the internal critic is not invited. Its job comes later. Collapsing the two phases — judging as you make — reliably kills both the quantity and quality of creative output.
The second block is audience anxiety: the sense that making something is only worthwhile if other people see it, and the terror of them seeing it and not caring. Making something that doesn't get shared is still valuable. Making something no one sees is still practice. The practice is how the skill develops, and skilled makers have a long history of unglamorous private output that never appears in the public record.