He set up triangles of tall posts from the city walls to the top of the hill and over them. On pulleys he strung an endless, circular cable to which was attached buckets. The weight of the buckets, filled with earth high on the hill, carried them down across the wide valley and up onto the walls, while at the same time returning the empty buckets back to the top of the hill. So delicately was the cable system balanced that no force beyond the weight of the loaded buckets was needed to keep the cable, and earth, endlessly moving. And so, for over a century, no army ever got inside those earthen walls.
Urgency focuses, drives the creative.
In other words, deadlines are good, not hindrances. A leap in thinking is necessary, often a leap seemingly into the illogical. An idea may be brilliant, but it may well require a profound practical skill to build the structure that will shape it into an actuality. These two qualities are not necessarily, as in the story, to be found in the same person. There is always something inexplicably, and marvelously, circular about creativity.