Too many successes is an indicator of mediocrity. The way to produce great creative work comes from your willingness to accept failure after failure.
If nothing ever falls short then that’s a sign you’re playing it safe. By operating well within your boundaries you also guarantee that you won’t achieving your maximum capability.
If you want to make something genuinely new and vibrant (rather than just churning out solid craftsmanship variations on an existing template) then you’ve got to take risks. Possible failure is the price you pay for the chance to create something of unlimited value.
So the secret to creative success is producing a large volume of risky work.
It’s one thing to understand this intellectually, though, and a completely different thing to handle it well in practice.
Because there are two ways to do this. And one is much easier than the other…
You can develop the ability to push through the pain. Or you can reframe ‘failure’ into a good thing. Then you never have to feel the pain in the first place.
I recommend the second option. Here’s how to do it:
Don’t think about merely accepting your creative failures (and certainly don’t make the common error of paying lip service to the idea that failures are good… then spend all your time trying to manage and minimise risk). Deliberately go much further. Actively embrace your failures.
Rejoice in them. Celebrate them. Hug them to your chest weeping with joy because you’ve done something totally awful that failed spectacularly.
Then set yourself up to go again.
And, sure, learn from what went wrong. But don’t use that as an excuse to play it safe. Maybe instead you line up another jump at the forbidding chasm and you take another new crazy risk.
Adopt the mindset of a venture capitalist. (Withhold judgement on what they do if that bothers you. Just focus on how they operate)
The most successful venture capitalists might expect to lose money on 8 out of every 10 businesses they invest in.
Is this because it’s so hard to pick a profitable investment?
No. If they wanted to play it safe then they could choose investments where they get their money back almost every time — but they wouldn’t make much of a profit either.
In order to find the few investments that deliver spectacular returns they’ve got to take a lot of risk. They know that just one ‘winner’ is more than enough to justify all the ‘losers’.
So why does this mean you’ve got to celebrate those failures? Because they’re the proof that you’re aiming in the right place.
Every time another attempt lands “safely” this could be telling you your aim is too conservative. Every time you miss (especially spectacularly) is a sign that you’re not restricting yourself. That you’re allowing yourself that aggressive aim that will give you the great breakthroughs you’re after.
It’s so tempting to only embrace the results you want — the clear successes. But doing that prompts you to avoid the necessary failures. It makes your aim too safe.
Celebrating your biggest failures is actually the path to achieving your biggest successes.