With no certainty they'll be any good

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) “Flowers in a Glass Vase” (1704), oil on canvas
Image courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts. 

From Oliver Burkeman's recent newsletter about "toxic preconditions."

Which brings us, I think, to the fundamental toxic precondition lurking behind every other toxic precondition: the strong desire we have for some kind of guarantee – before we embark on a new activity, or even just allow ourselves to relax into life – that it’ll all unfold safely and securely, that we’ll retain the feeling of being in control. That’s what you’re surrendering, in a small way, when you go ahead and write a few hundred words of your novel, with no certainty they’ll be any good. 

Here's what he writes about toxic preconditions:

I was pleased to discover, the other day, the exact phrase for an awful lot of what holds us back from living saner, happier and more meaningfully productive lives: toxic preconditions.

And what’s a toxic precondition? In this post, where I encountered the notion, the social scientist James Horton is exploring why people who’d like to do more writing fail to do that writing. He blames “misguided beliefs about what writing must be, in order to be worth it.” You tell yourself all sorts of things might seem, at first glance, like they’d help you do the activity well: for example, that you should get it right the first time, or that you shouldn’t expend the effort of writing on anything but “high-reward” projects. But the ironic result is that because you’re not confident your writing can meet those requirements, you just don’t write at all, or you do it far less than you otherwise might. Which is, of course, no way to get better at writing.