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Steven Spielberg is considered one of the greatest directors in film history for good reason — throughout his career, he’s made classic movie after classic move, seemingly rarely putting a foot wrong and leaving audiences satisfied the whole time. (Well, maybe not so much with Ready Player One, but we try not to talk about that so much.) You might assume this level of success has given him a sure-footed confidence in his abilities — but it turns out the exact opposite is true, and he credits that as the root of his success.

“I’ve always had shpilkes,” Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly in 2011, using the Yiddish term for nerves. It’s something that he’s carried with him throughout his entire career, and the thing that he credits with keeping him centered as a filmmaker.

“I think it’s my fuel, basically — my nervous stomach. That’s what keeps me honest, right? And a little bit humble, in the sense that when I make a movie, I never think I have all the answers. I think I’ve stayed collaborative my entire career because I don’t have all the answers. I come onto the set — whether it was my first movie, The Sugarland Express, or Lincoln — and it cuts me down to size. It’s a good feeling to have.”

Elsewhere in the interview, he talks about the nerves he had shooting the iconic Raiders of the Lost Ark — a movie where he didn’t feel comfortable about its climax.

“The one thing in Raiders I was a little bit dubious about was what happens when they open the ark,” he admitted. “What actually is going to come out of the ark? There were a lot of crazy things in the script that came out of the ark. I wasn’t sure how much we could actually get on the screen. We made a lot of it up when we were in postproduction.”

Consider that the power of improvisation — and also the power of knowing to listen to your shpilkes. If it's good enough for the man who made Jaws, Schindler's List, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's good enough for all of us.

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