"Screw it up all the way until the finish"

In a video about molten glass the artist says something I like a lot so I'm transcribing it here to reference it (slightly edited, emphasis mine):

A great piece is basically balanced right on the edge of failure and success.

It's just balanced right there.

But you don't really know how or where that line is.

So you're very excited about that idea, it's spectacular to you.

And you go and do it even though you don't seem like it.

You're going into it with a little bit of fear and trepidation to get too close to that line because you don't want to fail and lose it.

But once you do fail it... all that's gone.

Now it's game on.

It's all about just learning, right?

So if it's a piece that you know is going to take four and a half hours and at 3 hours, it's kind of screwed up.

And you just say, okay, let's stop and start over.

Well, you really don't know what happens in hour 3 to 5. You have no idea.

So when you get to three again. Now, you have no idea what's coming.

So my idea is usually if I screw up, screw it up all the way that I can to find out exactly what's hiding, what vocabulary of intuition has not been developed, what part of that language.

So now I've screwed it up, screwed it up, screwed it up all the way until the finish.

We know where things might happen.

So now, when I go back into it, I've got the intuition more developed.

I mean, failure ends up being a good space for discovery, right?

But it's like, if I'm going to fail,

let's keep failing,

let's keep screwing up.

Let's see what's there. Let's go find out.

You know, but if you just stop and put it away and start over, you're kind of missing out on a lot.