On why you should be a failer – not a quitter

I’m going to start with a personal story.

I handed Jayde the file on my USB drive:

“It’s the one titled ‘My Unproudest Moment As A Video Editor, Ever.’”

Actually, even that’s a lie. It’s not that it wasn’t my most epic fail to date (it was). But I had unimaginatively named the video ‘Final Render’ and handed it to her wordlessly.

I had no energy to speak. No inspiration to originally name an .mp4 file.

This was me on day 3 of my weekly edit-depression-spiral. I hadn’t replied to my friends/family’s messages in days. I was exhausted. Disenchanted. Most of all, I just wanted to go straight to bed and dissolve my overwhelming disappointment into sleep.

I also knew that when I woke up, I would be strictly ignoring our video marketing strategy, which requires me to post all our new vids to all our social platforms. Social platforms that are populated with every single person I have ever met since 2007. Horror.

I should probably note here that I don’t actually view this vid as a failure of Jayde to be an engaging science presenter. It’s not. She’s awesome. I view it as a failure because I let it become so big and unwieldy (8 minutes), that I had to compromise all my (admittedly laissez-faire) post-production standards, just to meet our weekly deadline. That said, it is a minor triumph of zero-budget set lighting and design, and Jayde and I both agree that her hair looks very, very good.

Anyway. I left her to upload the video to our YouTube channel and clambered into bed fully clothed. I slept on it. And, as usually happens when I sleep on things in yesterday’s clothes – I woke up in a hot mess at 3am, with the same thoughts churning through my head. As usual, the thoughts had coalesced into a more out-of-body, big-picture kind of melancholy.

If you’re anything like me, your experience of self-diagnosed failure goes something like this:

You know the lofty mantras surrounding failure. Failure is just feedback! Failure is a stepping-stone to success! You know this because you’ve seen the Instagram pics with cool typography and inspiring sunset backgrounds that tell you so.

But still, you feel that familiar feeling of internal shitness. When you headbutt up against your own limitations, you default to feeling frustrated and eager to call yourself a loser. You wish you were that type of person who defaulted to feeling intensely driven to problem-solve, so that you can get back to proclaiming yourself the winner.

If you are like me – are we doomed to a lifetime of failure?

Google says no. Google can reassure you. Google can tell you about people who failed a bazillion times before they got it like, totally right.

Google has much wisdom on the concept of grit. And how stickability and tenacity are just as, if not more, important to accomplishing great things than IQ and talent are.

Google can prove this to you with real-world case studies of people who failed their way to the top: Michael Jordan not making his college basketball team. Dyson making 5000 unsuccessful prototypes before he struck upon the most awesome vacuum the world had ever seen.

By reading about these people, Google may help you realize that you are grittier than you give yourself credit.

Google helped me remember that I failed my journalism cadetship test twice before I got in. It helped me remember that I got rejected for an overseas volunteer program before I got through. I remembered that it took me getting dumped by not one, but two filmmakers, until I finally realized I should be a filmmaker myself, not aspire to date one. Jayde & I’s first business failed (we made money, but failed to correctly identify our passions). Who knows if our second will work out either (it currently lacks a discernible revenue model, minor point). That doesn’t concern us at this point. We are building our skills everyday and getting closer to working out what it is we want to do with our lives.

It’s okay and natural to wince at the thought of your failures. I’m still going to cringe when I watch this particular video. But I’m now okay with putting it out there and telling the world that I made it. After all, it’s just a public record of me honing my craft, and discovering more ways that don’t work.

Don’t be afraid of your failures. And don’t be afraid of showing them to the world. So what if they are less than perfect? None of us are.