If you want to be creative, you will doubt your work

And maybe that's the best sign that you're on the right track.

🏷️ Categories: Writing, Creativity.

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Sometimes I feel like I arrived too late.

As if I showed up at the station just as the last train was pulling away. Everyone was leaving, and I—without a clear destination—had to decide whether to get on or stay behind. While the world became more artificial, more immediate, more superficial, I—stubborn—chose to write long letters. On a niche social network. With no guarantee of being read.

I wrote them out of necessity, as a way to prove to myself that every day you can learn something new. I didn’t write with certainty. I wrote not knowing whether it would help someone or mean nothing at all. But now, a year later, I realize that was part of the deal…

If you want to be creative, you can’t be certain.

Never entirely.

One Sunday afternoon, a group of old friends gathered. One of them paints (I’ve always admired his work). I told him I was struggling to decide which direction to take. What to write. How to say it. Whether it was worth it to keep writing long texts on the internet. He looked at me with the empathy of someone who’s been there. He knows what it feels like.

“If you want to be creative, you’ll have doubts.”

That sentence is unforgettable.

For years I believed creativity was about talent, inspiration, big ideas accessible only to a chosen few. That if you had doubts, something was wrong. Now I know that’s not true. Creating is, almost always, walking blindly through a forest no one has set foot in before. Doubt is a companion on the path, not your enemy.

And being lost isn’t a mistake—it’s the beginning.

We hate doubt. We love rushing toward solutions. We crave shortcuts and avoid thinking too much. As if the time we need to understand something is a problem. But I’ve been through this moment many times. I’ve written over two hundred letters, spent nearly four hundred days staring at blank pages.

Now I see it differently.

No one who knows the way walks through new territory. To be creative, you must be at the edge of the map. Originality comes just when you step into uncharted land. And insecurity comes with it. They always travel together. And yes, it’s scary.

Scary to not be liked.
To look ridiculous.
To be ignored.
To feel useless.

But we don’t create to please others. We create for our own joy and, if anything, with the ambition of making something meaningful. As Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian once said: we write to find ourselves. The rest comes afterward.

And so it did.

For months I wrote without a clear sense of direction. I would open my laptop and sit in silence. Sometimes nothing came, other times everything came at once. I wrote texts I often labeled as “questionable quality.” The more I wrote, the more questions I had. I always wrote them down for later reflection. Soon they began to pile up, uninvited.

“If you want to be creative, you’ll have doubts.”

That phrase always returns...

If you’re completely sure your work will succeed, you’re probably not creating anything new. You’re repeating. Creativity involves risk. You don’t know if it will work. You don’t know if people will like it. You don’t know if anyone will find value in it.

And that’s the beauty of it.

Because to do important work, as Seth Godin says, you must be willing to do something that might not work. That uncertainty breaks us—but it also forces us to be honest. You don’t have all the answers. Maybe you never will. And still, you should keep writing. Keep betting on an idea, despite the doubt.

There’s no shortcut to bypass this stretch of the journey.
No one creates without doubt.

I remember now Virginia Woolf’s raw confession from her diary:

“I must write without worrying whether it’s good or bad. I must go on.” — Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

Courage to Change

And when an idea doesn’t work, you need the courage to let it go.

Even if you’ve invested hours, days, even years into it. Part of the process is accepting that you’ll make mistakes. That you’ll take paths that lead nowhere. That you’ll write essays that don’t connect, paint works that don’t move anyone, and craft poems that don’t resonate.

So what do you do then?

You change.

You find another angle. Sometimes, after months of developing an idea, you have to admit you were wrong. But don’t regret it. The time wasn’t wasted. It was part of the process. That’s how I see it: when an idea doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you failed. It means you discovered something.

You learned what isn’t. And that puts you a little closer to what is.

Each iteration brings you a step closer to something that resonates. You have to listen carefully to what people say about your work, reflect, and decide your next move. Feedback helps you improve—but following every opinion blindly will throw you off course. Keep that in mind.

Listen to others and adjust where needed—but never stop being yourself.

And to do all this, you need a quality that’s becoming increasingly rare:

Patience.

My struggle to make quick decisions used to frustrate me. But over time I saw its value: it forced me to return, to look again, to better understand the problem. And that’s how, sometimes, I found solutions I wouldn’t have seen in a rush.

This happens because the dots connect… if you let them rest.

Creativity takes time. It needs to mature. Often, ideas that seemed completely unrelated ended up coming together in a piece of writing. Because I didn’t force them. I just let them be. There are ideas I’ve revisited for months, and then one day the moment came. One day they became a letter, and I clicked “publish.”

There’s a little-known concept: apophenia.

It’s the experience of perceiving patterns where none seem to exist. Connecting dots no one else sees. That magical moment when everything “clicks” doesn’t happen at the breakneck pace we’re used to. It happens when you let things settle—when you return to an idea again and again over days, weeks, or even months. And for that, you need to let go of urgency and embrace patience.

Novel ideas take time to be born—and when they are, they’ll make you doubt.

Because if you want to be creative, you can’t be sure.

And maybe, that’s the only certainty you need.

✍️ Your turn: Do doubts overwhelm you? What role does uncertainty play in your own creative process?

💭 Quote of the Day: “Perhaps, over time, I’ll learn what to do with this loose and drifting material of life, finding some other use than the one I give it.” — Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

See you soon! 👋

References 📚

1. Seth Godin. Impostor Syndrome. (2017). Seth’s Blog: [URL]

2. Woolf, V. A Writer’s Diary.