To succeed more, you have to fail more
My friend Ben Casnocha makes a very important point about creativity: You have to be willing to fail most of the time in order to knock it out of the park on a consistent basis. To illustrate, consider The Onion:
[T]o get the 18 quality headlines needed for each week’s edition, the writers have to propose 600 headlines in total. That’s pretty refined filter […] not unusual for a successful creative operation. At IDEO’s toy group only 3% of proposed product ideas survive. To come up with good ideas, you need to turn off the self-censor and crank out as many ideas as possible. Most of them will suck. But that’s part of the process.
I’d also add that, beyond turning off your self-censor, you have to get okay with the idea of looking and sounding stupid. This is harder for some of us than for others, and we all have our reasons for where we land on the self-regard scale. But the less seriously you are able to take yourself (which is not to say that you should not be able to take yourself seriously when appropriate), the better your chances of producing great ideas.
Lastly, it’s very important not to be the kind of person who instantly dismisses ideas without giving them a fair hearing. I know: I am a person who does that all the time, and it’s at once rude, arrogant, and self-defeating. Let’s just say I picked it up a long time ago and am trying to unlearn the behavior, but first I had to realize I was doing it and that it was both wrong and ineffective. (I also try to let people around me know that I know I do this, and that I’m trying not to, and that they can give me a really hard time about it if they want. I would hate for them to think my screwed up reactions are any reflection on them or their output.)
Filed under: Life
Thanks for posting this.
Not knowing you from Adam (and not hearing your voice more than Adam Curry’s), I have noticed some personality traits that I also saw in most of the fighter pilots I used to train. Those traits can make a person self-motivated as much as self-centered. The singleness of purpose can be read as a highly-competitive sledgehammer by some people on the receiving end of a one-on-one interaction. If I’m right on those perceptions, I’d go so far as to say that I’ve rarely seen them among Irish artists–the most creative group of people who espouse the urge to fall flat on their face in public because they know when they get up one of the times, they will be able to share a truly creative endeavor.
I don’t think you need to unlearn anything. Instead, I think people need to offer time and space to appreciate all the talents we can share together.
I had the best book writing experience of my life this summer: scheduled, productive; I lived semi-monastically and the output was regular and often startling. I was both calm and also, prone to tears; it was all spilling out and I felt that I had arrived in the place where I knew what to say and how to say it and to live it.
My agent hated the book.
It’s an interesting assignment, to know that the best time of your life, I won’t say ends in failure, but is laced with failure.
Thanks for the post.
Jackie: Good points all around.
Nancy: Aw! I was so happy for you until the end of your post! Please say you’re saving that book to submit again later. Maybe your agent just dismissed it without fully considering it (like I hear Jackie sometimes does).
:)
I love you guys. Heh.
I am entirely not bothered about looking stupid. I am terrified of sounding stupid. Which is probably silly.