Miles Davis's Creative Truth #1: Wrong notes don't exist until you make the next one.
Late in his career, Miles Davis often doodled during interviews to keep calm and entertained. During one particular interview, Miles was drawing and the interviewer asked:
“When you make a wrong line, does it feel the same as in music?”
Miles looked up:
“The line isn’t wrong until you have to put the next one down. Music is the same way. You don’t make bad notes. The note next to the one that you think is bad corrects the one in front. Only way you can do that is by experience. Only way you can take a line that you didn’t mean to draw is to draw every day.”
He was demonstrating his philosophy while explaining it: there are no mistakes, only paths you didn’t plan on taking.
[Source: Interviewed by Brane Rončel in Munich, Germany | 1988]