Possible Power Outage

Fear of Failure

“When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.” 

~Honore de Balzac

 I was talking with a friend of mine about the idea of failure as an integral part of the path to success the other day and she suggested a blog post on the subject. I love a good suggestion, thanks EKE!

  I learned to fail often in my twenties, during my first career as an art director. The deadlines are often very short, research time limited, and the clients at times inflexible. So you come up with many solutions to a design problems quickly and there is no real time to indulge your fear. Or perhaps I was too young when I started to have any real experience with failure. And bad design solutions were always there, over and over, seen, understood, and discarded when at last something that could work was found. I had a nice group of fellow designers and there was a great deal of sharing of ideas and input that made the good results happen. I learned that repeated failure was integral to success. The good ideas are rarely the first ones. It might be the best thing I discovered in my 20 year design career!

  Here is a quote I found from a designer that summarizes the process pretty well:

  It is very important to embrace failure and to do a lot of stuff — as much stuff as possible — with as little fear as possible. It’s much, much better to wind up with a lot of crap having tried it than to overthink in the beginning and not do it.” ~Stefan Sagmeister

And this is another interesting thought from the legendary Milton Glaser: 

  A characteristic of artistic education is for people to tell you that you’re a genius. [...] So everybody gets this idea, if you go to art school, that you’re really a genius. Sadly, it isn’t true. Genius occurs very rarely. So the real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you’re not a genius, that you’re not as good as you thought you were. [...] There’s only one solution: You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure because otherwise you simply would never subject yourself to the possibility that you’re not as good as you want to be, hope to be, or as others think you are.” ~ Milton Glaser

  These are some of my favorite ideas about combating the freeze that accompanies the idea that my efforts with result in failure (and be a waste of time, and be a public spectacle, etc., etc,..)

• Recognize and let go of your doubts
• Remember your previous success 
• Trust yourself
• Understand that failure is part of success
• Enjoy the process of searching for new ideas
• Decide to let some ideas have a lot of time to evolve
• Listen to other people, then decide for yourself
• Don't listen to the toxic people around you

  But the best advice for painters comes from the hand of Vincent Van Gogh, who certainly had some experience  in overcoming that fear:

-in a letter to Theo Van Gogh, Drenthe, 28 October 1883... 

  If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint... and that voice will be silenced, but only by working.

(Vincent van Gogh)

Happy Failing, everyone!

  If you have a quote or a thought to share about failure as part of the process of art, please comment below by clicking the comment area and writing your comment there.

  Do you all know about the great website, Brainpickings? I picked up a couple of the above quotes from there today and they have many wonderful articles and illustrations. Check it out here.

Okay, that was a lot of musing, how about a painting?

"Tyvek"  available