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You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion. More on this in the next few bullets.
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What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? - Quora via kottke
I think this is equally true of artists, and is related to what Keats called negative capability:
when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
When you are a artist of any stripe (I am reliably annoyed by the word “creative”—or maybe just the people that use it; ditto “maker”), you spend so much time between the much glorified inception of a project and the much lauded finish. It’s mostly middle, and middle is muddle, and you have to accept that. You have to accept that you live with a certain level of mess all the time.
There are useful and not-useful kinds of regimentation in an artist’s life. The useful kind (and the kind I have the hardest time with) is routine: you must return, every day, to the blank page, undeterred by whatever terrors or frustrations you found there yesterday.
The not-useful kind is a sort of interior, conceptual regimentation, which manifests itself as a kind of knowingness: “Oh yes, I’ve seen this before.” The longer you are able to live with the (perhaps delusional) belief that this could be something new, the greater your chance that it actually is new.
