Have more humility. Remember you don’t know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.
— https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2015/09/24/al-kennedys-ten-rules-for-writing-fiction/
The reason this advice works is that confidence built on past results always lags behind what's actually possible for you now — you're a slightly different writer with every page you finish, so yesterday's ceiling is a bad measure of today's reach. Say you've only ever written tight, plainspoken scenes. Try one that demands lyrical excess, or a structure you'd normally call showy, and let it be clumsy. The clumsiness is data, not failure. The caution is that humility about your limits can quietly become an excuse to abandon judgment altogether, chasing every stretch goal and calling the mess "growth." Pushing past yourself works only if you're still paying attention to whether the result is actually better — otherwise you're not expanding your range, just wandering outside it.
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