All that you do will inevitably be flavored with uncertainty...
Tolstoy, in the Age Before Typewriters, re-wrote War & Peace eight times and was still revising galley proofs as it finally rolled onto the press. William Kennedy gamely admitted that he re-wrote his own novel Legs eight times, and that "seven times it came out no good. Six times it was especially no good. The seventh time out it was pretty good, though it was way too long. My son was six years old by then and so was my novel and they were both about the same height..."
Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending. The risks are obvious: you may never get to the end of the sentence at all - or having gotten there, you may not have said anything...
Simply put, making art is chancy - it doesn't mix well with predictability. Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the pre-requisite to succeeding.
- David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear
“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
“Leap and the net will appear.”
- Zen saying