Photo: woodleywonderworks
It’s important to have a good relationship with failing.
Since failing is not an objective, external fact, but rather an interpretation we make, it turns out there is an art to failing. And like any art, doing it well takes practice.
Let’s say you’ve got a great idea. It’s a really great idea, and you fully expect it to be your personal jackpot.
Your idea is this: you’re going to reveal to the world your comprehensive list of songs that plants like.
You’ve discovered that your Meyer lemon tree likes a particular Puccini aria, but only on weekdays. On weekends, the lemon prefers certain jazz standards, like “Stormy Weather.”
You can get your tulips to do yoga by whistling Sousa marches to them.
And so on.
Now imagine spending years compiling your trade secret knowledge into an encyclopedia of plant song.
You hire web designers and marketing folks. At last, after five years of development and tweaking, the big day arrives, and you launch your product. Unfortunately, no one wants it. One person buys it, but he uses it as a doorstop.
The objective event of no one buying your product is not, in itself, a terrible thing. What is bad is the feeling of disappointment you have. After putting in so much effort, this experience of failure is bound to be hard to shake off. You might even feel like taking it out on your plants.
Now compare that scenario to this one. Same idea, different approach to realizing it:
Instead of spending years (and lots of money) putting a plant song book together, you make a list of “The Top Seven Songs Adored by Jade Plants” (informed by your copious research, of course), and within a few days, you put it online for anyone to see. You don’t charge a cent for it, but you do have a friend who knows a little bit about web design put up a form so visitors can post their comments. Then you tell all your friends about your new site.
Imagine all the things that could happen.
If your friends visit the site, but none of them even comment (or if they only leave comments such as “just stop. please.”) then you have learned something.
If one of the commenters asks whether you need to have formal voice training to sing to your plants, and the next comment is “Yeah, I was wondering that, too. Will I hurt my voice if I sing to my plants too loud?” then you have learned something else. It might be time to find a voice teacher you can partner up with.
In fancy engineering contexts, it’s called rapid prototyping.
I like calling it “fail as quickly as possible.” Get something out there, learn from what works and what doesn’t, try the next thing. Note that this “proactive failing” really only makes sense if you are doing something. The various ways of not acting, such as procrastinating, don’t provide the same benefits.
Try writing a comment to this post, even if you’ve never commented on a blog before. Share your insights about failing in productive ways. I look forward to reading them!
Having heard it somewhere once upon a time, I can’t claim this as my own, but your post reminds me of this little bit of perspective. In the sport of baseball, having a fantastic batting average still involves failing two thirds of the time.
One other note on the failing topic… Interesting that you would include a labyrinth image with this post. What makes a labyrinth different from a maze is that a labyrinth’s path always leads one to its center. There are no erroneous paths. One could see the labyrinth as a reminder that a failure is not a waste, since it will inherently lead to new knowledge. Like Edison suggested, failures are not wasted time, they are ways to learn what doesn’t work. In that way even failures can lead us toward our ‘center’. As in the labyrinth, despite many twists and turns that appear to lead in the wrong direction, they can in time steer us to success.
Doug – I really enjoyed your example of the songs that plants adore. Its a lovely way to get to a discussion about failing well.
Last weekend I had a day of failures in the studio and thought I should really have more of these days so when they do happen, its not such a big deal. It seems that failures in any kind of creative work can keep you going because they lead to new ideas almost immediately. Even though I know this academically there is no replacement for the feeling that you get when your failure opens up a bunch of new doors – each one going to a new possibility.
Also I have had this experience in creative writing lately – a thought will be brewing in my head and until I put it in the computer or on paper, there seem to be no fresh words to further the story. Almost as if the brain can hold only so much and until that is exercised – it cannot go any further. Once I write down a story I can suddenly think of a new character or a plot twist or some fresh dialog – even if most of the initial writing eventually gets trashed.
Andy: Thank you for the examples. I think of a young whipper-snapper striking out in a little league game. It is SO hard (even with supportive people around) for the batter to experience this in a positive way. When you see with perspective, then perspective seems natural. When you’re not seeing with perspective, it seems very hard to get to a place where you could.
This reminds me of “trying to be patient” while waiting in line. If you’re really patient, you don’t have to try to be patient, because the wait isn’t a problem.
Bhavna: Thank you for sharing your experience (and experiences). Knowing what we “should” do doesn’t make it easier to forge ahead, but you point to the importance of “going ahead anyway, in spite of worries and fears.” And because you do move ahead, it is easy to see that you are an artist (rather than a could-be artist)!
This is such a great perspective. The prospect of failure is a brick wall in the way of trying new things. But looking at an enterprise as a wonderful experiment where you’re not betting it all on one go – that turns failure into a way to fine-tune, to risk just a little. What’s the worst that could happen?
p.s. I kinda want that plant song list.