268: Brave Creative Humans: Failure (Part 2)

Failure has a lot to teach us. We can learn far more from a failed experience – whether large or small, big F “Fail” or little f “fail” – than a perfectly smooth, frictionless experience will ever make possible.

I stumbled upon a post on social media recently (by someone named @brightwanderer) about their perspective on “success” and “failure”. It was a breath of fresh, “muddy middle” air in a sea of right and wrong. Here's what they said: “I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success. Like… If you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it's a “failed” business.” They go on to explain that the same line of thinking happens all the time, for example about not finishing the writing of a book or experiencing divorce or fizzled friendships being seen as “failures”. There’s so much gained along the way that we’re doing a disservice to ourself and others when we enact binary thinking about success. They finished by saying this: “… the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don't think that's doing us any good at all.” I couldn't agree more.

In this second of two episodes about failure, I asked our brave creative humans “When is a time when you failed, what did it mean to you and how did you move forward?” 

Let’s listen in…

Big or small, costly or relatively insignificant, we will all experience failures. However, it’s often much more about the steps we take after experiencing a major hurdle; our reaction to the situation is often more important that the situation itself. Calculated risk often equal reward with the opening of new doors and windows, shiny new ideas and incredible new people to collaborate with, even if, to the outside world, something is perceived as a “failure”. A frictionless existence may feel good in a digital experience but isn’t a recipe for a fulfilled life. Success in creative pursuits often happens when we shrink the gap between failure and trying again.

However often failure walks along you, you are a brave creative human. 

Next time, Allison, Kevin, Vincent, Meg, Emad, and Justine Abigail share their thoughts on comparison to other creatives and how it affects their creative confidence. 

Stay tuned…

---

Music:

Just Havin’ a Beatbox - John Bartmann licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle

Boat Origami Photo: Boat Origami Photo by Alex on Unsplash