Creativity wins when failure is viewed as a chance to learn.

For full experience we highly recommend going to your music provider and play “Channel ORANGE | Frank Ocean” (link to Spotify!) as you are reading this, promise it’s worth it. Ok back to the topic now!

Contrary to what most people believe, failure is not the opposite of success.

And honestly, we have been taught since childhood that mistakes are part of learning, that nothing usually comes out perfect on the first try, and if it does, you might as well buy a lottery ticket.

Falling off a bicycle at the park, maybe messing up the breakfast you tried to make for your situationship the morning after? or maybe taking several attempts to park a car? these are all ordinary failures we accept as part of learning.

So why is it different for creative work? Why do some people give up after a few failed attempts? Isn’t learning the whole point of what we do? Figuring that out is urgent if we want creativity to thrive in our process.

Failure is unavoidable when you create something new or try something different, something you’ve never tried before. We all know that, so still, why do we feel frustration or self-doubt when it happens? It’s part of nature!

Maybe it started in school? Post-school activities?

You know what, it probably started when we were conscious enough to compare ourselves to others, right? It kinda makes sense.

Think about it; if you are only aware of yourself, competition doesn’t exist. You are not rushed to succeed so fast, right? So then the question is, at what stage did we start to compete with others? And let’s explain competing - it’s not “I’m better than you,” it’s “I can do it too.”

Back to the park now! think of that feeling when you saw one of your friends using one of the playground equipments before you could. It wasn’t resentment; it was, “Wait, why can they do it and I can’t?” Now take this and make it the adult version: “Wait, I can sew too. I can design a collection too. Fuck it, I can mix an album too.” It has to be easy, right? No. And definitely impossible if you are not willing to fail in the process of understanding it.

When we learn, we get better, so in a sense, failure is actually a source of insight. It can point to your weaknesses, or even when talking to peers about what you created, you might find the things that might fail you in the future; and learn how to work on them today.

Journaling is also a key tactic. Crazy numbers here: an average person hears between 20,000 and 30,000 words each day. Yes, 20k to 30k words. So if you think that you have time to look into your failures and dissect them, let alone think that you can do it in your head instead of writing it down, you probably never learn from your failures; at least not maximizing the most you can learn from them.

Original ideas cannot coexist with fear of failure.

Many breakthroughs in music, for example, happened because the fear of failure wasn’t there. Dilla’s swinging drums or Ye’s chopped soul are byproducts of that thinking - the idea that failure does not exist.

When Larry June said “I don’t take it as an L, it just wasn’t for me.”? That’s success, not failure, because understanding that something wasn’t for you saves time and resources you can invest into other things. You see it clearly now? There is no such thing as failure if you set the rules for what creative success means for you.

So there we have it. Before we approach any project, let’s first define what success means to us, how we’re willing to fail, and what we can learn from it. Call it a safety measure if you want, but if you know and recognize that failure can only take you to a better place, how fast would you want to fail? Really; if failure guaranteed mastery, how fast would you want to fail? Right.