“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

– Scott Adams, cartoonist and creator of “Dilbert,” quoted by Adam Grant in Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (2016)

We are so hard on ourselves as artists. But without the courage to bend the metal a different way, toss a rhyme into a line in a novel, deliberately tweak a well-known quote in a bit of dialogue, or take a melody up instead of down, we would never create anything new. We would never truly create.