Recovery from failure…

Despite my rel­a­tive youth (yeah…I’m still cling­ing tena­ciously to the final year of my twen­ties…), I’ve faced and tasted fail­ure many times in my life, some­times by my own hand, some­times at the hand of oth­ers. I’m bet­ter off for it.

Don’t get me wrong — it is never pleas­ant, it takes the shine off your day, it brings you face to face with your lim­i­ta­tions and crashes you into the dirt with dis­ap­point­ment, the dan­ger being that if you stay there long enough, you’ll never fly again. I’ve seen it time and time again, in friends, in fam­ily, peo­ple who have traded in lofty dreams for medi­oc­rity. That type of exis­tence is not for me and chances are it’s not for you either.

The encour­ag­ing thing is that if you face fail­ure well, it is only a toi­let break on the long ass road trip we call life.

This post is a record on how I face fail­ure. If you’re feel­ing dis­cour­aged, I sin­cerely hope this post helps to put you back on track.

Have I done okay? By who’s standard?

Before I talk about recov­er­ing from fail­ure and then going in the oppo­site direc­tion — suc­cess, I sup­pose it would be use­ful to fig­ure out if I am suc­cess­ful or not. Hmm.

So, think­ing back to when I was grow­ing up, I recall I was a soli­tary crea­ture who loved being alone and the thing I loved doing the most while I was alone was draw­ing stuff — mon­sters, cars, robots, babes, etc. I loved the fumes of my medi­ums, the silence, the lack of inter­rup­tions, just me and my imagination.

Look­ing back, I think it was pretty clear what my life’s direc­tion was and deep down, I guess I just knew I wanted to make art and to cre­ate a life that sup­ported this endeav­our. I know I didn’t want to work a day job to fund my art life, I wanted it to pay for itself.

Lets snap for­ward to the present — my day typ­i­cally con­sists of get­ting paid well to draw and paint in my paja­mas while lis­ten­ing to music, engag­ing in after­noon naps, play­ing video games, read­ing cool books and blogging.

Judg­ing from my per­sonal check­list of what I’ve wanted out of life, I’ve guess I’ve done okay for myself. If I judged my life on the cri­te­ria of a suc­cess­ful patent lawyer how­ever, this may be another story. On this basis, I’m sure you can deter­mine how much you want to trust my advice or ignore it.

Failure…what the heck is it?

For me, the def­i­n­i­tion of fail­ure is when you look to achieve an out­come and you (or you and your team) come up short.

Where I’ve failed.

• I’ve stud­ied the wrong things and spent a but­t­load of my work­ing years climb­ing a lad­der rest­ing on the wrong wall.
• I haven’t fol­lowed through on my bold promise to deliver an art team’s vision and work­load on time and at the qual­ity level promised.
• I’ve failed time and time again to make my voice heard when it could have made a difference.
• I’ve alien­ated friends and cre­ated ene­mies when there was no need to.
• I’ve under deliv­ered to clients because of a fail­ure to take every­thing into account.
• I’ve given up when the final leg of the marathon was in strik­ing dis­tance because I feared the inevitable judge­ment at the end.
• I’ve placed trust in peo­ple my gut instinct told me not to.
• I’ve com­pro­mised my own morals.
• I’ve allowed rela­tion­ships to carry on for longer than their expiry date.
• I’ve placed being liked ahead of being effective.
• I’ve wasted time and oppor­tu­ni­ties look­ing for alter­na­tives when I had what I was look­ing for all along, right in front of me.
• I’ve missed on dead­lines, styles and execution.
• I’ve blamed cir­cum­stances and I’ve blamed other peo­ple for things that didn’t go right.
• I’ve over com­mit­ted to projects.
• I’ve cared too much.
• I’ve cared too little.
• I failed to inspire.
• I’ve been too harsh.
• I’ve been too soft.

These are just some of the things I have failed at and regret­ted. I’ve felt low because of them, I’ve wanted to run away, to hide in dark cor­ners, allow the world to turn on with­out me. It’s no under­state­ment that I am not per­fect, where I’ve faulted in the past was either absolv­ing myself of blame or beat­ing myself up men­tally to the point of being an extra on a Romero zom­bie flick.

I think this is how a lot of other peo­ple also deal with failure.

Part of the solu­tion for mov­ing on, is to recog­nise that most things are not for­ever, they don’t nec­es­sar­ily need to stay “failed”. Always aim for that elu­sive per­fec­tion, with the full knowl­edge that you will sel­dom achieve it. And don’t beat your­self up over it.

How does it make you feel?

Fail­ure in any endeavor, will usu­ally do one of three things to you — it will either make you feel noth­ing; it will make you feel pissed off; or it will make you feel like tuck­ing your tail between your legs and whim­per­ing in the corner.

I know because I’ve felt all three at dif­fer­ent times, so lets talk about pick­ing up and mov­ing on.

Get­ting past it…

Feel­ing indif­fer­ent and apa­thetic towards fail­ure means that you will nei­ther learn or grow from it. It sig­nals that you have lost the pas­sion for some­thing or never had it in the first place. It always strikes me as absolutely bat­shit insane that the major­ity of peo­ple I meet tol­er­ate a mediocre career, mar­riage and exis­tence with­out a plan on how they are going to improve things.

The solu­tion is to find some­thing or some­one else to care about or to dis­cover a way to reignite the pas­sion lost. Where there is no emo­tion, you can never hope to achieve great things. As Elie Weisel once said:

Because of indif­fer­ence, one dies before one actu­ally dies.

The sec­ond feel­ing, where you feel pissed off, for me at least has always shifted me into over-drive. If some­one pro­claims I’m not good at some­thing I want to be good at, DAMN them to hell, I’ll show that they’re wrong. I won’t argue or bitch or moan, I will sim­ply clam up in my fortress of soli­tude and push past my bound­aries so that at some point I will be able to say “In Your FACE!”

I’ve found that if it is har­nessed the right way, angry energy is an extremely pow­er­ful dri­ver for me. Part of my com­pet­i­tive nature I guess. The trick is not to let it over­take you, being a per­pet­u­ally angry per­son sucks.

The final feel­ing you may expe­ri­ence when you fail, is one of shame, you can’t believe it hap­pened and you go over it in your mind, turn­ing the past over and over again — how could some­thing go so wrong?

Self blame is typ­i­cal at this stage, and if left to fes­ter, it can really ham­per progress in your life. You need to have a heart to heart with your inner self, fig­ure out how much was your fault, how much was beyond your con­trol and how to not only avoid the same pit­falls in the future, but how to come out on top.

Read­ing the book The Monk and the Rid­dle by Randy Komisar, an incum­bent old hand in sil­i­con val­ley, brought into focus the fact that fail­ure rates are high in his cut­ting edge game changer world, but that it has been past fail­ures that have allowed him and oth­ers like him the most growth opportunities.

I played the self blame game for a looong time after I left Inter­zone games, it damn near made me quit art alto­gether, down in the dumps, no one to turn to for help, I had to rebuild myself from ground zero, go back to my roots, my dri­ving fac­tors to see if they were still there. They were, but I had to do some seri­ous soul-searching and re-configure my mind before I even picked up a pen­cil again.

It can take time…a lot of it, but this intro­spec­tion is worth it, and in my opin­ion, absolutely crit­i­cal in not hav­ing those same issues speed bump you in future endeav­ours. Once I put my demons to rest and plot­ted my new direc­tion, excit­ing things hap­pened so quickly within those next 6 months it was breath­tak­ing, but I would not have gone there if I hadn’t been through that prior fail­ure and learned their lessons well.

Where to now?

Whichever reac­tion you ini­tially expe­ri­ence, there will be a point at which you reach a con­ver­gence — as in each of these paths will lead to a sin­gu­lar point. At this sin­gu­lar meet­ing point is where you decide what hap­pens next, do you boldly try again? Do you retreat tem­porar­ily and then try a dif­fer­ent path? Do you sur­ren­der? Or do you stand still while the weeds grow all around you?

Only you can answer this one, so dig deep but remem­ber this: make your next way-point mean­ing­ful, or your fail­ure will have been for naught.

Aude Aliq­uid Dignum — Dare Some­thing Worthy

Although I enjoy and appre­ci­ate what I have, in keep­ing with the per­sonal dic­tum that human poten­tial is near lim­it­less, I will always endeavor to push on to greater heights as I believe most peo­ple should. In doing so how­ever, in push­ing bound­aries and fron­tiers, part of the bar­gain is that at any moment, whether from lack of cal­cu­la­tion or cir­cum­stances out­side our con­trols, we can fail at the things we set out to do. The less defined the path, the higher the risk poten­tial for fail­ure and only you can decide if the down­side is worth it.

I per­son­ally think it is tragic when dreams are sub­ju­gated to the fear of pos­si­ble fail­ure. We as a species have the unique abil­ity to man­i­fest abstract thought and to bring about its phys­i­cal equiv­a­lent through con­certed effort. Using our men­tal capac­ity to accept, learn from and move past fail­ure is a big part of this whole busi­ness of defin­ing a life rather than liv­ing by default.

As I leave you, let this great quote by Abra­ham Lin­coln under­pin your actions today:

You can have any­thing you want if you want it badly enough. You can be any­thing you want to be, do any­thing you set out to accom­plish, if you hold to that desire with sin­gle­ness of pur­pose. — Abra­ham Lincoln

Catch you on the flipside.

Daz

Ignore the problem…focus on the solution.

The title of this post is obvi­ous as hell. No shiz, thanks for telling me…but you know what? Obvi­ousity (new word I made up) means nada with­out con­stant rep­e­ti­tion and act­ing in accor­dance with “widely accepted truths”.

Read­ing is good for your brains, spend less than you earn and invest the rest is smart, eat­ing a box of choco­lates ain’t the best for your waist­line — these things are all obvi­ous, but sel­dom prac­ticed by the major­ity of peo­ple. These are some of the rea­sons why first world coun­try trends means we’re becom­ing fat­ter, poorer in sav­ings and stu­pider in general.

Why did I just men­tion all that? Maybe to pla­cate the inevitable “Well that seems obvi­ous, I don’t know why it needs men­tion”. The answer, is because some­times we all need to be reminded of sim­ple truths to reignite good inten­tions we have allowed to atrophy.

First, you need to ignore the bloody problem…

The way we have been con­di­tioned to think in this day and age (through mass media) is that the prob­lem is the be-all end all, it is the point to be focused upon, it is in vogue to bitch and moan and tell every­one how much things suck.

Whoa is me!!! If I com­plain to enough peo­ple, maybe some­one else will join in with me and we can engage in a pity party hug puddle.

Tut tut, pity is the province of those who think the world owes them a liv­ing. The world owes you, me and every­one else, nothing.

What is the out­come? You fuck your­self in the ass, that’s what.

The end result of focus­ing exclu­sively on the prob­lem will be this — you sur­round your­self with equally unhappy indi­vid­u­als, the prob­lem is placed on a pedestal before which you all wor­ship and before long it becomes the all con­sum­ing thing at the fore­front of your mind and you’re not a sin­gle step closer to alle­vi­at­ing it.

It’s poi­so­nous and you need to stop it in it’s tracks the minute you become aware of it.

No if’s or buts, if you want to achieve great things in your life, you need to over­come this mon­u­men­tal yet largely invis­i­ble problem.

Defeat those men­tal naysay­ers. Develop your own per­sonal mind guard.

We moan and bitch because we allow the neg­a­tive part of our brain to take over, it’s like the lit­tle neg­a­tive devil that sits on your shoul­der telling you that you’re no good, or that you’ll never amount to any­thing, etc.

What you need is your own per­sonal mind guard, a pro­tec­tor shrouded in tita­nium armour forged in the blood of a thou­sand Viking men and inscribed with pow­er­ful ancient ass kick­ing San­scrit from the fourth apocalypse.

The fol­low­ing used to be the con­ver­sa­tion I’d have in my head that I’d have with myself, my devil naysayer is called Demon Face and my kick ass pro­tec­tor is called Char­lie Sheen:

Demon Face: Jesus Christ, I can’t draw for shit. I’ve been at this for over 2 hours and all I’ve got to show for it is a half assed mess on the screen, oily hand marks on my Cin­tiq and an ass cal­lus from hell. Why can’t you get your fin­ger out of your puck­ered ass­hole and get some real work done?

Char­lie Sheen: Because you filthy son-of-a-bitch, this is what the ini­tial stages of art­work look like, and if you don’t like it, you can go sit in the cor­ner and suck on your thumb for a while and cry me a river. If you’d rather stay, shut your mouth and stop your sissy ass whin­ing, or I will curb stomp you, then kick you in the balls.

These days, Demon Face don’t utter much, ’cause he’s in the gut­ter, puk­ing up blood while Char­lie wails on him with a bro­ken cham­pagne bottle.

You must pro­tect your psy­che, your drive and your direc­tion because if you don’t, it will be frag­ile and your resolve will shat­ter at the slight­est of provocations.

It can be the dif­fer­ence between a life squan­dered and one that is not.

Ignor­ing the prob­lem is only one half of the equa­tion. Now, you have to think about the solution.

You can’t just empty your mind of prob­lems, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t be not-troubled any more than you can’t be not-hungry…unless you’re dead or delay­ing the inevitable that it will come back to bite you squarely in the ass.

You must fill the new void.

If you do not focus your mind on some­thing more pro­duc­tive, it will nat­u­rally lapse back into neg­a­tive thought pat­terns. Nope, you have to pre-occupy your men­tal gym­nas­tics with how you will tackle the prob­lem, aka The Solu­tion. That is where your focus and ener­gies should be channeled.

So the next time you’re landed with a prob­lem, remem­ber to stop the bitchin’ and start the solvin’.

If you’re keen on see­ing how I typ­i­cally solve prob­lems, check out this prior series of posts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Keep whip­pin’ Demon Face’s ass, and I’ll catch you on the flip side.

D-Man

Powernaps and productivity.

Run­ning a busi­ness means that you always have an end­less amount of work to do, if it’s not reply­ing to client emails, it’s bal­anc­ing the books or work­ing on new designs, and if it’s not that then it’s plan­ning the days ahead or doing marketing.

It can some­times seem over­whelm­ing, but I’ve grown accus­tomed to it and I thank God that I love doing most of it or else I would have gone postal a long time ago and buried myself in a tub of cook­ies and cream.

Why does pro­duc­tiv­ity matter?

Despite that, love for my work doesn’t change the fact that there is always a load to do, there­fore being effec­tive while I’m doing it makes sense — you get the work done quicker, more accu­rately or cre­atively which allows you to either move onto another task, or sim­ply have more free time.

Why does every­one need to work from 9–5?!

Enter the typ­i­cal work day for most peo­ple, the 9–5 monster…I just don’t think it works that well. It’s a dated, blunt force, dinosaur of a tool imposed on a highly non-homogeneous pop­u­lace. Each of us have our indi­vid­ual body cycles, some pre­fer to work early in the day, oth­ers later in the day, some of us late at night while every­one else is asleep.

You don’t work at a con­stant rate unless you’re dead…

Per­son­ally, I have always found it extra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fi­cult to remain at near full pro­duc­tive capac­ity for the dura­tion of the 8 hour work day, it sim­ply stretches far too long with­out a chance to recharge some­where in the middle.

My pro­duc­tiv­ity cycle dic­tates that for the first 4 hours of the day, from 9am-1pm, I am gen­er­ally awake, fir­ing on all cylin­ders and burn­ing through my work. Come lunch time how­ever and this slows to a crawl as my stom­ach is busy digest­ing food and I am work­ing at half mast. My eyes are droopy, I’m on autopi­lot try­ing to stay awake and hop­ing my slurred speech doesn’t make peo­ple don’t think I’m high on drugs. Later on in the after­noon though, I get a sec­ond wind and I am often work­ing up to 12am or later the next morning.

Lots of peo­ple fol­low a sim­i­lar pat­tern, but due to their salaried employee sta­tus, sus­tained pro­duc­tiv­ity isn’t a huge con­cern for them. As a free­lancer who gets paid per hour how­ever, this is a huge con­cern because inef­fec­tive time really is very costly.

This is where pow­er­naps come into the picture…

Being fully aware of this surge-lull-surge in pro­duc­tiv­ity dur­ing the day, rather that fight it, I’d pre­fer to flow with it. I’ve adopted some­what of a bi/polyphasic sleep­ing pat­tern (as opposed to a monopha­sic sleep­ing pat­tern that most adhere to) now that I also live with a part­ner who has a dif­fer­ent work sched­ule from myself.

I go to sleep rel­a­tively late as I enjoy the peace and quiet and can get a lot of my art done dur­ing the night / early morn­ing. Then I usu­ally awake around the same time as my part­ner, which would mean I don’t get the reg­u­lar 8 hours sleep. I work till around lunch time when I will either go to the gym first, or have lunch and an after­noon pow­er­nap for about 25 minutes.

After the power nap, it almost feels like a sec­ond morn­ing and this will help to fuel me through to another 6+ hours of work if I need to. On par­tic­u­larly long days, I will some­times take two power naps spaced about 6 hours apart, and I judge the neces­sity to do so based on my clar­ity of thought.

This sim­ple addi­tion of power nap­ping dur­ing the day helps me immensely, I’m able to learn more, be more pro­duc­tive around the clock and achieve more dur­ing my wak­ing hours. If you’re a uni stu­dent or some­one who sim­ply has a lot of activ­i­ties out­side of the 9–5 day, try giv­ing pow­er­naps a go, they may just be what you need to get more out of each day.

If you try it out, let me know how you go with it in the com­ments

Keep kickin’ ass.

Daz

Corporate Hindenberg No.7…or is it No.8?

In the last seven years of my cre­ative career, I have wit­nessed first hand the implod­ing of just about every sin­gle com­pany I have worked for, so that makes it about seven or eight com­pa­nies in the span of those seven years.

Is it because I have some kind of cor­po­rate death touch? Well, I have no idea, but it sure sounds like a good basis for a Bruck­heimer movie with lots of explo­sions and non­sen­si­cal dialogue.

The rea­sons behind busi­ness fail­ure are numerous…in fact, far more numer­ous than I have the space or men­tal reserve for in this blog post, so I’m just going to give that topic a wide berth.

Read more

Why you need to become more than just a creative.

I tend to think a lack of busi­ness skills on the part of cre­atives, deval­ues the entire indus­try more than any other factor.

Because cre­atives have no idea how to charge, no idea how to estab­lish their worth in the minds of clients and thus no com­mer­cial back bone, we col­lec­tively suf­fer as an industry.

Here is a lament I often hear from other cre­ative types:

“Clients are so dumb! They com­pletely under­value my work!”

Wrong chump.

Read more

Time Management, Schedules and Discipline…

Hi guys and girls,

One of my blog read­ers (hey Andrés!) is in the process of learn­ing about art­work and some of the things I have pre­vi­ously men­tioned spiked his interest.

Inter­est­ingly, they are more gen­er­alised skills in the area of time man­age­ment, sched­ul­ing and dis­ci­pline, applic­a­ble in any field as opposed to art-centric skills.

I promised him that I would write a blog post about these top­ics and thought “Well, since they are all inex­tri­ca­bly linked, why not write a sin­gle post about them?”

Read more

Business Skills

After being in busi­ness for myself for the last 8 months, I can hon­estly say that I don’t ever want to go back to a staff job again, I absolutely love run­ning my busi­ness, doing the work that I do and the flex­i­bil­ity that goes along with it.

I think above all, how­ever, the feel­ing of being able to pro­vide for myself with­out the need for an ongo­ing employer is an absolutely amaz­ing feel­ing and has def­i­nitely imbued me with a great sense of con­fi­dence, worth and con­trol over my own life, since every­thing I do directly affects my via­bil­ity as a business.

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Some thoughts on Focus

The dead­line looms, you’ve been play­ing with your­self inces­santly for the last week and a half and due to pre­vail­ing fac­tors that are now out­side your con­trol, it is time to pull your fin­ger out of your corn­hole and get some work done.

Due in 24 hours and if suc­cess­fully com­pleted this project promises fame, for­tune and a tro­phy wife with the men­tal capac­ity of a squir­rel. On the flip­side, if you slip up, leav­ing your client in the lurch, your rep­u­ta­tion plum­mets like a stone and more than likely, you’ll be on the cor­ner sell­ing your body for cashola in no time.

This kind of sit­u­a­tion sucks and causes much unnec­es­sary stress. I’d pre­fer to save my aggra­va­tion to spend on my favourite UFC fighter when he gets his tal­ented ass KOed due to chronic par­ty­ing and not tak­ing his job seriously.

Assum­ing you’re given suf­fi­cient time to do a good job, and the mon­e­tary reward is fair, you should never have to be in such a posi­tion, but we often are due to a lack of focus.

If you don’t want to crunch, if you want to come out at the end of a project look­ing like a star, if you want to put your best foot for­ward so that you can move onto big­ger and brighter things, FOCUS is one of the defin­ing fac­tors that sorts the men from the boys or women from the girls.

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Climb that ladder…Redux

A cou­ple of posts ago, I wrote down some quick quick career advice on how do well work­ing on staff.

I recieved a fan­tas­tic response from Jazz and decided to reply in a new post as I think a lot of the points he/she brings up are valid. Although I rebutted some of Jazz’s asser­tions, I don’t nec­es­sar­ily think my responses are bet­ter or worse. My responses con­form to my men­tal­ity and Jazz’s con­form to his/her own mentality.

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Climb that ladder…

Although I no longer work in a staff posi­tion as I now run my own stu­dio, there was a time not that long ago when I was employed as a staff con­cept artist and art director.

Being on staff really is quite an excit­ing place to be early on in your career, you get to see how things work up close and per­son and you are privy to how peo­ple inter­act and behave around others.

Hav­ing been there, let me offer some sug­ges­tions of things you may want to keep in mind if you’re look­ing to fast track your career up the ladder.

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