Fail!
James Swingle
It's easier to criticize than to create.
That's a concept normally used to dismiss critics and to celebrate the creative act; one used to convey that it's nobler to create than to criticize.
However, it's an idea I think we'd be better taking at face value. It's damn hard to look at a blank sheet of paper and create something beautiful, or powerful, or persuasive. But it's not all that hard to see when something's failed to achieve those ends. Even when that something is our own creation.
So while the ultimate goal remains creativity, the sharpest tool we have is criticism.
Given that it is easier to criticize than create, how do we harness our skill at providing perfect-pitch feedback about what doesn't work? How do we accomplish things by doing what we do easily—criticize—rather than what's damn hard—create?
We might get some ideas from looking at the two great engines for producing solutions by weeding out failures: evolution and the free market.
The free market is full of people trying to solve problems and realize opportunities—in sum, to create something from scratch on that blank piece of paper. But the majority of those attempts don't succeed. Many businesses fail, many under-perform, and most (if they last long enough) at some point spend lots of money releasing products that go nowhere. Yet, while individual businesses and products fail in large numbers, the system as a whole creates amazing wealth, providing solutions to needs from food to medicine to entertainment for large portions of the globe. Whenever an opportunity arises, the free market churns out potential solutions, and then allows solution after solution to fail. Business after business go under, product line after product line pass into oblivion, until finally a solution does work, and a new way of doing things enters the world.
Evolution gets new possibilities through random mutation—a blind, non-intentional process. However, given enough mutations, combined with a critical feedback system for knocking out those that don't work (in this case, failure to survive and pass along those newly mutated genes), evolution has created eyes and ears and livers, giraffes and dolphins and eagles, as well those wonderful things called humans.
So how do we use the processes of the free market and of evolution in our personal lives? By doing what we care about time and again, with small variations, and using our marvelous ability to criticize to weed out all the bad ideas and unsuccessful variations we'll try along the way. By piling up failure after failure after failure until one day we look at what we've done and say, "You know, this one isn't horrible. This time, instead of throwing it out whole, maybe I can just make a couple more modifications, and it will work."
There's a saying, "There's no failure, only feedback." Nothing wrong with the saying, but personally it's never spoken to me. It suggests a far more tentative attitude towards failure than I like. My saying is, "Fail at least two hours every day." Depending on what you do, that failure might be writing atrocious first drafts, making unrequited cold call after cold call, brainstorming lists of hundreds of harebrained plans until you come up with that one which will actually work. I find it more fun to run gloriously into failure like a Norse berserker charging into battle, knowing that each dreadful draft is just one more swordsman standing between me and the treasure of the finished story, that each harebrained plan is just another pikeman between me and the solution that will move things forward, that each rejected cold call is just one more archer between me and that person out there right now seeking exactly what I offer.
And if looking back, the Norse berserker metaphor doesn't work, no matter. I'll keep making up analogies until I hit one does work. I'll sail across an ocean of failure like an explorer in search of adventure and new lands... climb failure like a mountaineer cresting Everest... weed failed growths from the garden until I find a rose... plunge into failure like a deep sea diver swimming ever deeper into the unknown...
James Swingle (Noneuclidean Cafe Publisher and Editor) offers business training, consulting and coaching. You can find out more at www.jamesswingle.com. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Aoife's Kiss, Black Ink Horror, Susurrus, Byzarium and other publications. Mr. Swingle's short story "Fortune Cookie" was just made into a short film, directed by Mike Allore. You can find out more about Mr. Swingle's writing at fiction.jamesswingle.com.
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Article Copyright © 2007 James Swingle. All rights reserved.
