It’s hard as a Creative Professional, to really fail, and not care. You put your heart into your work, and when it isn’t successful, it’s tough to not take it personally.
As designers we have a tendency to treat our work as our babies, as a thing that we labor over and try to perfect. But what if that baby totally sucks? All of our hard work is just out there in the universe, open to subjection and opinion… and even worse, what if that opinion is just our own Negative-Nancy voice?
Failure is inevitable.
Failure can be a positive and important part of the creative process. Being creative means experimenting with new ideas, new techniques, and new ways of thinking. If that is true, then the road to good work is most certainly paved with some, if not a lot of failure. It’s easy to stick to tried and true solutions, play it safe in your bubble of prescribed success. It is scary to push back and try new ways. The key is to not let perceived failure stop you in your tracks. You need to think of failure as just a set back, on the way to success.
“Failure is just the negative space around success.”
If you look at history, it is full of amazing people who have failed big time. Here are a few people that may have failed, but have gone on to do big things.
Thomas Edison
Mr. Edison totally sucked at inventing the light bulb. In fact he failed 10,000 times before actually inventing it. He is quoted as saying, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Michael Jordan
Jordan has played some pretty crappy basketball. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Bill Gates
Starting out as a Harvard dropout, Gate’s first business, Traf-O-Data was never successful. Despite this, Gates went on to become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, at 31 when Microsoft went public in 1986.
Even eROI has had some success stumbles. Back in 2011, our CEO Ryan Buchanan made a big decision not move forward with a huge software platform project, an ESP similar to MailChimp. At the time, it looked like failure. Fast forward to the present, and instead of focusing on software, we are focused on building long lasting partnerships and relationships with our clients. Out of those partnerships we are doing some great work.
They can’t all be wins.
Because of the exponential growth of technology today, it seems that the likelihood you could fail in our industry is even greater. Technologies change along with consumer taste.
That reminds me, this guy actually got fired from Apple:
So you hate your own work.
I feel like as creatives it’s pretty normal to hate your own work. I can feel good about a project, then look at it two months down the road and think, “what was I doing?!?!, this is crap”. It’s that little voice inside my head, that inner critic always scrutinizing my work.
I am not alone in this feeling, Bruce Springsteen hated “Born to Run”. He said, “After it was finished? I hated it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it. I thought it was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard.” People love “Born to Run” and since then, Springsteen has gone on to win 20 Grammy Awards.
I personally have not won a single Grammy, but I like to think the little critic inside is driving me to be better. It makes me practice, learn and iterate. If I was just 100% satisfied with everything I created I would never have the drive to make things better.
Sometimes you just think you suck.
Impostor Syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. It’s when you are successful and you attribute that success to luck or good timing. You may even think you have tricked everyone around you into thinking you are good, because your inner critic is telling you, you are not.
Quiet your inner critic:
1. Here them out.
The first step to quiet your inner critic is to identify your critic. Mine goes something like this, “Really, you are going to eat TWO lunches… do you really need TWO lunches?”. You have to really zero in and pick out the negative thoughts. Once you identify the negative dialog, listen to what it is saying. Usually you will find that the negative thoughts are not really true at all.
2. Dispute them.
Now, treat that inner critic’s voice as if it were said by some third person whose job in life was to make your life miserable. Then you can think of this voice as irrelevant, and at the very least, you can dispute what this voice is telling you. Everyone has moments of self-doubt, it’s moving past those moments so that they don’t cripple your creativity that is key.
3. Take a walk.
Your inner critic lives in your head, not your body. It can help to get out and move around. Even focusing on listening to your surroundings or concentrate on how your body feels in the moment can get you out of your head and quiet that inner critic.
There are worse things than failure as a Creative. Indefinite procrastination, goal abandonment, or even… the acceptance of mediocre work because of the fear of failure.
If you are thinking you suck, you might be doing it right. It’s okay, suck and fail, as long as you are working towards something great. Some of the biggest failures keep at it, it’s not that they don’t have an inner critic, it’s that they don’t let their inner critic stop them from creating, playing or dreaming.