Chapter 6

How Good Was My Failure Today?
Failure is a crucial part of the journey.

What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail? 
     -  Robert Schuller

If you're not insecure about your writing, you're either mailing in forgettable stuff or somebody else is writing for you.
      - Harlan Coben

My many weaknesses are starting to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.
     - John Steinbeck, written in his journal August 16, 1938, when he was writing Grapes of Wrath. As quoted in his journal published under the title Working Days.

Much of what is termed “writer's block” is an artist's inability to overcome his or her insecurities, and his or her fear of how the work will be received. Is my work good enough? Am I good enough? The artist is paid, or not paid, as the case may be, to overcome those fears and work.

If you are doing unique work, creative work, you will experience a lot of failure. It is the nature of the territory. If you are not experiencing a lot of failure, you are not trying hard enough, not experimenting enough.

Ninety-five percent of the results of creativity are garbage. Derek Sivers has been very inspiration to me in the sense of asking himself, “How good was my failure today? What did I try that didn’t work?”  That for me is a real inspiration. To every day try and do something that I could have failed at. That is part of the process. That acceptance of small failures.
-       Kevin Kelly on CreativeLive

A life in the arts is about showing up
Day after day, year after year.
Art isn’t about freedom

It isn’t about talent.
Art is about limits. Hard work.

Horace Traubel, biographer of Walt Whitman, once asked Whitman, “Suppose the whole damned thing went up in smoke, Walt, would you consider your life a failure?”

Whitman’s response:

“Not a bit of it.... No life is a failure. I have done the work: I have thrown my life into the work: my single simple life: putting it up for what it was worth: into the book — pouring it into the book: honestly, without stint, giving the book all, all, all: Why should I call it a failure? Why? Why? I don’t think a man can be so easily wrecked as that.”

Journal notes on failure in painting:

Creativity relies on accidents; creative people have an attraction to the unpredictable, to scenarios where new combinations, new ways of seeing, evolve.

Sometimes I set aside a painting thinking it’s a failure because it wasn’t what I had in mind, was striving for. But then, sometimes I come across it in the reject pile months later, and like it. In fact, that is true of some of paintings that later turn out to be favorites. Technically, many of these are failures but they capture something unique and interesting about the subject.

More often though, a painting that feels like a failure when it is completed still feels like a failure months later. I discard most paintings I start, and many that I complete.

Paintings most often fail because I lacked a simple, clear vision at the outset. Or, I had a clear idea at the outset but lost touch with the idea during the execution.

On the other hand, that’s probably true of my successful paintings too. When I painted Two Egrets, my most successful painting, at least in terms of sales, the plan was to paint a mangrove forest. There was no intention of adding egrets. They were an afterthought, and the forest, in the process of painting, became a waterfall. The paintings that excite me, that make the hair on the back of my neck tingle are the simple, quickly executed sketches that capture something profound about the essence of a subject.

I think the real artists are too busy with just being and growing and acting (on canvas or however) like themselves to worry about the end. The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

So put it out there. Let it make its own way in life. Let the consequences be what they may.

The most demanding part of Living a life as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.
- Anne Truitt, a sculptor from her book Daybook: The Journal Of An Artist

In 1907, Picasso painted his most controversial painting, Les Demoiselles Avignon, The Young Ladies of Avignon. It's of five nude female prostitutes in a brothel in Barcelona. They are painted with strange angles and profiles — harsh, unforgiving, almost threatening. Even his friends reacted negatively. Matisse, perhaps the most controversial painter in France, was reportedly “enraged” by the painting. It met such a strong reaction that Picasso hid it away for several years.

. . . no one could have been prepared for the shock of 1907's Le Demoiselles Avignon which many see as the most important painting of the century and one of the critical turning points in the history of any art form.
     - from Creating Minds by Howard Gardner

What I'd like to make you realize at once is the incredible heroism of a man like Picasso, whose moral loneliness was, a the time, quite horrifying, for none of his painter friends had followed him. Everyone found that picture crazy or monstrous.
     - Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, art dealer

Picasso, after painting one of the most important paintings of the century, retreated from it. Picasso, a man legendary for his self-confidence and indifference to criticism and rejection, hid away one of the greatest paintings of history because other people found it repulsive. At first. Eventually, it expanded our conception of art. It expanded our imagination. Eventually, it prevailed. There's an important lesson there. You can't let the voices take over. You have to let it rip and roar. It is difficult. The possibility of failure is always staring you in the face. Artists who stick it out to the bitter end enlarge our vision of life, of courage, of potential Years after painting it, Picasso offered these thoughts:

A work of art must not be something that leaves a man unmoved, something he passes by with a casual glance. . . It has to make him react, feel strongly, and start creating too, if only in his imagination... He must be jerked out of his torpor. You have to wake people up. To revolutionize their way of identifying things. You've got to create images they won't accept.

An artist's insecurities are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can inhibit work, and discourage work. On the other, they can spur an artist into efforts of constant improvement, and constant experimentation.

You can’t just pick up a guitar or sit down and play a piano without knowing the instrument. Well you can, it’s freedom, but it isn’t art.

Pollock studied art for years before he created his drip paintings.

Where's the Juice?

Journal Notes:

Have faith in your passion, in the juice of your life.
Don't lose that. The song within.
That's where your power is. Live in your power.

A.J. Verdelle (author of The Good Negress) interviewed by Nancy Middleton in Glimmer Train (Fall 1998):

Interviewer: I love that James Baldwin quote you cited during your talk: “You don’t get the book you want. You get the book you get.” You spoke about finding the passionate author of a piece.

Verdelle: Yes. Where’s the juice? What’s happening here? What’s good? What is my favorite thing? Having looked this over again and knowing that this is now some sort of story, in whatever shape it’s in, what part of it would I not relinquish in any way? This is why my story kept changing, I think.

So I wrote the whole thing about Margarete, and it was not good. It was not what I wanted. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had wasted, in my mind, a lot of time. So that was tough. But I kept going. This is another thing that I try to talk to people about: understanding that line of observation. Just because you observe something doesn’t make it deep. Just because I knew it was wrong doesn’t make that the deep thing. The deep thing is the story that is still waiting for my attention. So until I figured out what to do, I had to keep working. . .

We want to look for where the passion is in the work, because that is going to be the anchor, that is going to be the basis of the mountain that is built. . . 

Where’s the juice? Where is the passion in the work? If you could only retain one thing, what one element of this work would you not give up?  Where is the essence?

After all the invested time, the elements that can be stripped away without affecting the power of the piece, what is left is its essence –- the passion, the juice, the mountain on which the work must be rebuilt. Everything else, no matter how much time (blood sweat and tears) went into it, can be, needs to be, thrown away.

What we’re craving is that juice. That’s what we want to see, or read, or listen to. And learn from.

. . .

I have insomnia. Most nights I wake up after a few hours sleep, pour myself a glass of wine, and think about life. I think about what I’m learning, what I should be learning but am resisting. I think about who I am and who I want to be. In other words, while many suffer from insomnia, I actually enjoy it. After an hour or two, I generally fall into a deep, wonderful sleep.

One of the interviews I keep coming back to was my interview of Thomas Berry. Berry proposes that the universe is a creative entity, that creativity is a positive energy force, including even creative destruction.  Further, human consciousness is created by the universe so that it can reflect back on itself.

Ed Catmull is President of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studio and author of Creativity Inc. He was interviewed by Tim Ferris for the book The Tools Of Titans.

Ed Catmull: The final film bears no relationship to what we start out with.

Ed: All our films to begin with suck. We had to start over internally with Toy Story II. We had to do it with Ratatouille. All of our films to begin with suck.

Tim: Why do you say that? Just that the rough draft is really rough?

Ed: This is the big misconception that people have. That in the beginning a new film is the baby version of the final film when in fact the final film bears no relationship with what you start with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean this because we are self-effacing or modest. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.

 People who can't live with failure shouldn’t be artists, shouldn’t engage in creative work. We need them at the post office, where they do the same thing, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. The creative process is about writing your book for years and then throwing it in the fire one night because you know it is no good. And the creative process is about starting again the next morning and doing it right. And then, when you finally get it written so that you feel okay about it, no one wants to publish it. It gets rejected and rejected. But you keep trying because you believe in it. You believe you have something to say. So yes, there's ego involved. And maybe some alcohol. Maybe you need a little alcohol to believe that the world is wrong and you are right.

Then there's the other failure in the creative process and in life -— a lack of belief in yourself, a lack of self-discipline. You are supposed to sit down and write your book, but instead you answer emails and meander around on Facebook. It is a lot more fun approving friends on Facebook than it is failing at a painting. Picasso created over 50,000 works of art in his life. He did 10,000 of those in the last ten years of his life —- that's an average of three a day when he was in his eighties. If you think those were all masterpieces you haven't seen them, but regardless of what he did or didn't do the previous day, he got up in the morning and went to work. And he changed art.

Nothing is more expensive than a start.
-    Nietzsche

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
-       Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn