“Das Leben ist nie etwas, es ist nur die Gelegenheit zu etwas.”
“Life is nothing but a chance for something.”
— G. F. Hebbel

I loved this quote when I first discovered it in my late teenage years. I intuitively understood it to mean that you get one chance: you need to make up your mind and take it. I created an artwork around it, featuring a disappearing figure. It was, of course, never exhibited. I am still chewing on this lesson. Some parts of it I have managed to uncover; others still feel closed off to me, and I am often too hard on myself for not having achieved them yet. Financial freedom, for example—although that is a constantly expanding term. Or the kind of creative confidence in which I imagine feeling completely comfortable. I have been thinking a lot about creative confidence: where it comes from, whether it can be learned, and why it seems to arrive only after we have already begun.

Truth be told, can you become confident without practice? I don’t think so. I have tried and learned many things—from photography and interior design to dancing tango, speaking Spanish and building businesses. None of them felt comfortable in the beginning. Confidence seems to arrive as a by-product of either knowing, more or less, what to expect—or knowing that whatever happens, you will deal with it. For better or for worse, you know you will survive. It can be painful sometimes, but it is the only way forward. We so often wait for confidence to give us permission to begin, but perhaps it works the other way around: we begin, we stay present, we survive the uncomfortable parts—and confidence slowly follows. Practice does not only improve the work. It changes the person doing it.

Learning tango was perhaps the most literal learning experience I have had since “going to school”—although what exactly I learned there, I can hardly remember. Tango, however, I know by heart. Only to my own very personal extent and understanding, of course, but still: I felt as though I could fly. Not only once, but many times. Funnily enough, that feeling was exactly why I started dancing in the first place. I wanted to relive it. I wanted to recreate it deliberately. What a powerful reason to learn. I couldn’t help thinking that, if there were one thing—and there is a rather successful book suggesting that we focus on just that one thing—that I wanted to figure out, it would be this kind of flying. Or, ahem, dancing.

Can you imagine that we didn’t “practise” this particular dance beforehand? We simply spoke the same basic language of movement, heard the same music and were both completely present in our bodies—listening, feeling every inch of ourselves and noticing what the other person was doing. That is what let us fly. It sounds simple. And perhaps it is, once you have learned the foundations.

I was lucky enough—or perhaps creative enough—to learn those foundations in no other place than Buenos Aires itself, and then to practise them fiercely across Europe. No milonga—the traditional tango gatherings—was safe. I danced in some of the most spectacular places, from Clärchens Ballhaus in Berlin, where I once bumped into my icon Wim Wenders, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Nostalgia and romance are never far away when it comes to tango. I am forever grateful for those dancers, for all those flights and for those evenings that somehow always felt lonely despite being spent in company—a little melancholic and filled with unbelievably beautiful music. Tango moves you, whether you like it or not. It is an incredible feeling to move through it in return.

Maybe creative confidence is not comfort at all. Maybe it is the willingness to step onto the floor before you know exactly what will happen. You learn the basic language. You practise. You pay attention. You lose your balance and find it again. And slowly, almost without noticing, you begin to trust that you can respond to whatever comes next. This has been true for me not only in tango, but in photography, design, business and every other creative undertaking I have chosen to pursue. The confidence never came first. It came through repetition, through mistakes, through showing up again and through continuing long enough for something that once felt impossible to become familiar—and, occasionally, even effortless.

Maybe that is what Hebbel’s “chance for something” means to me now. The opportunity is not one defining moment that we either take or miss. It returns every time we choose to participate: in a dance, in an idea, in a business, in a creative life. Creative confidence is not something we find. It is something we practise.

And every now and then, when knowledge, presence and courage meet, we might even feel as though we are flying.

PS: We filmed this on an original 1920s camera in one lovely take – because I wanted to try the analog magic also filming. What do you think – timeless or dated? It was a fun challenge to make it in one take – actually a skill that works well nowadays filming with the iphone on stop-and-go mode: Press Pause button instead of stop at the end of each sequence, that way you don’t have to cut later!