Seriously, Failure isn’t the bad guy.
An argument in favour of the most demonised part of the process.
They say humility is key, but almost a decade ago when I became a Creative Director, I was running on pure adrenaline and pride. And my biggest source of pride for those first few months was my Killstreak.
As any creative who has ever had to pitch for business knows, you keep a tally of your killstreak at pitches. How many had you totally decimated? My team and I then were fired up – we had a legendary 7 – 0 streak; all back to back consecutive wins. It was the most intoxicating high that made it seem like one couldn’t fail.
(Spoiler alert: One failed. A lot.)
Many of us think in absolutes when it comes to failure; To win is good, to fail is bad. In fact some of us see an even see an admission of anything less than stellar success as a harbinger of doom.
We’ll come back to that in a minute.
It may go against everything you’ve learnt, but failure really isn’t the opposite of success. It’s an element of it. You fail to actually learn what NOT to do. Think about it - you tripped over as a toddler many times before you even learnt how to walk. And I’m pretty sure your first attempt at playing a board game or video game probably ended in a glorious walloping till you learnt how the game worked.
The idea that absolutely EVERYTHING you put your hand to should succeed right off the bat is absurd. Have you ever thought about the word Research? There’s a “Re” in it for a reason. All of life is trial and error. That’s expected – you haven’t been here before. Wole Soyinka, David Droga, Ibukun Awosika and Christopher Nolan – we’re all making it up as we go along. (If you have actually lived this life before, that’s a separate post entirely)
My Agency, Up In The Sky puts in for a ton of pitches each year, just like every other Agency. (Unlike most others though, we may perhaps turn down a bit more offers to pitch than we say yes to, being mindful of our capacity).
And the pitches we go for? Of course we don’t win them all! The law of averages already tells you that. You bat high to win a few. That’s how the game works. Imagine going for 50 pitches a year and winning all 50. Who’s going to work on all those accounts? Our resources would be stretched so thin everyone would burnout in weeks or we’d be caught in never-ending loop of hiring to grow the team for each new account until the business collapsed under its operating costs.
Realistically, you only need a few wins, not all the wins. Quality beats quantity.
Now take that analogy and apply it to your life as a person. Does it make sense that there would be deals that fall though, projects that don’t quite work out and expectations that don’t deliver? Totally. And I think you’d learn a valuable lesson from each one.
It also makes you understand how the popular advice you receive should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. “Winners Never Quit” sounds inspiring as heck until the context is you’ve been sinking money into a bad venture for years and the smart thing to do would be to quit and try something else.
There are few absolutes in life.
Which brings me back to the hilarious cases of extreme “fail rejection”. Friends who take sick days off work and you see them later with a bag of tablets looking weak and you say to them “Hey man, I hear you’ve been sick.”
And they reply “No, not me. I’m just feeling very strong at the moment.”
I get it, I get what you’re doing, but no.
Naa.
