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