Cooking, to me, is is the art of being precise. You have to plan how liberal you're going to be with ingredients, timing and preparation, and then follow that guideline to the letter. I might even call it algorithmic, as long as your algorithm allows room for adjustment.
The reason why I believe most people dislike cooking is because of a fear they'll end their creation in catastrophe. Make guidelines to follow, and eventually, cooking becomes second nature.
Everybody makes mistakes, and the hardest critic is yourself. It is only through experimentation that one can learn how to cook, or how not to cook.