Recently, someone I was interviewing asked me what I looked for in the perfect maker.

Immediately, reams and reams of qualities came to mind. I opened my mouth to call forth what have been a ten-minute projectile of words. I’ve written about some of them. I’ve drawn pictures of others. After all, it is the endless fascination of my career, analyzing and exploring and asking and learning the nuances of this simple little question: what does it to take to make a good new thing out of nothing?

Alas, a long list of traits is inherently unhelpful. The candidate would have sat politely, eyes glazing over as I prattled on. We humans are designed for parables, proverbs, simplicity. An answer is not really an answer if it is too complex to be remembered.

So I said this instead: creative confidence. These days, this is most top of mind for me when talking with candidates.

I first came across the term in the title of David and Tom Kelley’s book. The term rolled off my tongue and danced in my ear with its pleasing chime. I knew instantly what it meant. This was the quality I had been questing for, the holy grail of creatives everywhere, the unwavering faith that, at the end of this mess, the thing we have touched and molded will be something wonderful.

But here is the double-edged truth of makers: the act of creating anything original is uncertain. By virtue of the fact that what you are trying to do has not been done before, you cannot know how it will turn out. You cannot know how long it will take to get to something good.

At the same time, we humans crave certainty. We like knowing where our next meal will come from. We like folks who keep their promises. To get a group of people to accomplish anything together, planning is essential.

The magic trick is keeping these two facts in balance. When the unpredictable forces of creativity take over, you get situations that can’t scale. Would you back a director who couldn’t tell you whether her next movie would come out in one year or seven, even if her movies are brilliant? Would you work with someone who was a genius but who was completely unreliable when it came to when and how you two would work together?

Similarly, when the desire for certainty trumps everything else, you get derivative and mediocre results, like too many movies with the same predictable ending. Overvaluing certainty means you end up choosing the same paths that have already been trodden, so while you may have a good idea of exactly how the budget, schedule, process and product will turn out, you’ll also rarely find yourself winning awards for innovation.

A person with creative confidence understands how to strike this balance. She understands and accepts that uncertainty, false starts, and mistakes are part of the creative process, but she also projects a sense of stability and progress to those around her. Yes, she makes you believe, there is indeed a beautiful story in this collection of random footage, the mistakes we are making are teaching us new lessons and making us better, and when we premiere our movie, the applause will roll through the auditorium like thunder.