You have your big risk, the big thing you’re working on in mind. There’s a lot of ways to get there. You can put everything into taking the big risk, right now, win or lose. You can also build up to it, by taking a series of smaller risks along the way, and learning everything you can.
Those smaller risks, though, have their own big risks in them. Or at least, they should. What I mean is, even if you’re taking a ‘small’ creative risk, there should still be something big on the line, to push yourself and what you’re doing. It’s a chance to fail, to learn, and keep going. You also have to train yourself in three very important skills, and along the way, you’ll learn a 4th one.
Skill 1, and yes, I truly believe this is critical skill 1, is resilience. Whatever technique you have or don’t have, skills at the craft, at the art, that you have or don’t have, resilience has to be in there. Resilience is what tells you, “This didn’t work, but there’s something in here, something about THIS, that has meaning, that speaks to me. Keep at it.” Without resilience, you’ll just give up at every failure.
Skill 2 is the exit. This is another critical skill. When to end a piece. When to leave what you’re doing at the right point with the audience. When to go, “this piece as is does not work.” The exit is NOT the same thing as just walking away. It’s the moment that concludes whatever it is you did, and to get to it, you need Resilience. But sometimes, the exit is for knowing things like, “I can’t find what makes this work using this approach, I need to exit this and find another way.”
The last one, Skill 3, is failure. You can’t get to failure without resilience. You can’t get to failure without knowing how to exit. You have to get to failure, and resilience and knowing when to exit will get you there. Because once you get to failure, you know you’ve hit the edge. You’re pushing past, and you’re going to learn something at that edge. If you aren’t learning, you aren’t failing. You’re losing. Losing and failing feel like synonyms but they aren’t the same thing. Losing is what happens when you don’t win, it’s always a negative, there is nothing to be learned other than, “I lost.” The word itself has multiple meanings … in the right context, lost means, “to have gone astray, missed your way.” In the context I’m talking about, this is the opposite of failure, which is still being on the way, on the path, just having failed to meet your goal. But you can learn from the failure, and push ahead, and try again if you’ve got resilience. You can also look calmly at your approach, and determine if you’re on the path, should you exit?
Then there’s a 4th skill that comes along, too. Success. It’s part of the magic of resilience, finding Success. You find your first moment of success, of the happiness of an audience, the movement of an audience, of yourself, of anyone, and that it helps you build resilience. The same thing with learning all the nuances of the right kind of exit. The first time you end a piece on just the right note, the first time you take enough control to say, “This does not work, but I can fix it,” and every time after, every situation where it applies, those exits feel like success. And then there’s failure. At some point, a light bulb will go off, and you’ll feel your confidence swell. You’ll see it. Wow, these failures didn’t kill me. These failures helped me learn. These failures helped me keep moving forward. These failures are a success, in their own way, the proof of the work, and you realize how clumsy the English language is, because in one context these ideas are antonyms, but in reality, they’re synonyms when you contrast the small failure with the larger success along the way.
And then you see it, and you’re ready for it, the first time that there’s just success on its own. The moment comes, and there is no need for resilience, because it’s right now and it’s effortless. The same moment, you exited perfectly, without thought. And there was no failure. You finally learned how to succeed, and you found a paradox, because you learned without failure. And you realize, wow, that’s possible too. But then you realize, nope, it’s all the same thing.
And it all makes sense, and you hope anyone you know who does creative work can find the same path, too.
10 years ago, heck, even 5 years ago, I hadn’t integrated something I learned about product development into my creative work. That thing that hadn’t integrated was a kind of combination of resilience, failure and success; where you know you’re on the right path, don’t get it right the first time, but keep working on it.
In my creative life, I would’ve just dropped the thing and moved on. Sometimes that makes sense, but sometimes, the problem isn’t the core idea it’s how you executed it. I got this piece that just did not work, but I liked the heart of it. I worked in classes, I performed it at open mic nights, and then in one small class at the UCB, it finally worked. FINALLY! That’s nice. š
I’m on the verge. I can feel it. Let’s see what happens next! š