The ONLY way to succeed as a creative person

The right way to fail

Hey friend,

I know Friday is the day I share videos and whatnot, but today’s newsletter is actually inspired by a youtube video I recently watched. You see I wasn’t sure what I wanted to talk about in today’s newsletter, not until this random video popped up on my homepage.

The video is The actual way to Succeed as a creative person by WheezyNews and it is linked below, but let me tell you the 2 things I took from it.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

1. Fail a lot
   You have to be ready to fail. It’s impossible to “become” creative without failing—a lot.
   
   There’s a case study in the video about a YouTuber who made a very successful video about the entire history of the world. But before that, he made a lot of smaller, random, videos that all built up to the successful one.
   
   And that is a common theme among successful creatives. You make a lot of work that sucks until the good one, but in the process, you learn a lot that ends up useful when you make the good stuff.
   
   Now, failing is not actually enjoyable as much as we try to find positives but there is a way to fail good.
   
   

2. Fail good

   If you want to fail good, you need to lower the stakes.
   
   What that means is you fail in a way so that it doesn’t matter if you fail. The expectations and pressure we put on ourselves are often the reason why we hate failing and that in turn leads to not trying things out which in turn means we’ll never create that good stuff.
   
   So the solution is to remove the expectations as much as possible. How?
   
   Well, one interesting thing WheezyNews mentioned is not talking up your projects as a masterpiece.
   
   I don’t even share my projects until they’re done and while I’m trying to change that, it means I can fail and start over without having to update anyone.
   
   If you do share your projects as you’re working on them, then it’s better to lower expectations, so people don’t expect a masterpiece that maybe doesn’t come.
   
   Just as how some movies tend to disappoint when they are released because they couldn’t live up to the hype the trailer built up.

   
   

So fail a lot and fail good. It’s not easy but for most creatives, it’s the only way to create good stuff.

That’s it from me today. Have a great week. I’ll link the video below if you’d like to see it and feel free to share what you think. See you on Friday

x

ash.