Creativity Quote by Neil Finn

There is a sly punk optimism baked into Neil Finn's line: if you're going to screw up, at least commit. It reads like a joke you toss off backstage, but it smuggles in a serious creative ethic. In music, "mistake" is often just another word for "unplanned choice", and doing it twice is the oldest trick for turning accident into style. One wrong note is an error; the same wrong note repeated becomes a motif. Intention is retrofitted through repetition.

The motto also needles perfectionism, the kind that freezes songwriters in endless revision. Finn's catalog has always balanced polish with looseness, the sense that melody is discovered, not manufactured. "Do it twice" gives permission to move forward, to stop treating every misstep as evidence of incompetence. It's pragmatic psychology: if you can recreate the failure, you can study it, control it, maybe even make it useful.

Subtextually, it's a small rebellion against the mythology of genius. We like our artists to appear effortless, as if the hook simply arrived fully formed. Finn flips that fantasy. He implies craft is built from glitches, false starts, and the courage to repeat what embarrassed you long enough to see what's actually there.

Context matters, too: coming from a working musician, not a motivational speaker, it lands as shop talk. It's the kind of rule that keeps a band sane on tour and in the studio, where confidence and momentum can matter as much as correctness.