Fall Forward
Why we learn when picking ourselves up after a fall
When I decided to start JUMPTHECUT, the movement that one day hopes to inspire a generation of filmmakers to buck the trend, the advice I often got from cultural entrepreneurs was “fail fast, fail often.”
Reasonable, powerful advice. But if I must admit, it’s flawed advice.
I was flustered, desperate, and rigorously experimenting. “Fail fast” sounded to me like a fool’s errand. I needed a different mantra to keep me going.
So I made my own version:
Fall fast. Fall hard. Fall forward.
Not fail. Fall.
You see, successful people tell other people to fail if they can, because then it gets rid of their fear of failure. But it also throws the baby out with the bathwater. Because we shouldn’t be telling people to fail. We should be telling them to go and experiment, and play, and create.
Do you remember when you were a kid? There was no such thing as failure. You had fun, or you didn’t.
Usually when the fun stops, it’s because your mother tells you playtime’s over. But very often, the fun stops because we fall, and hurt ourselves.
Then we learn not to do that thing again, or learned to do better next time. If we tried to hurtle ourselves over a wall, and failed, we learned not to do that again. If we tried to do a stunt with our bicycle and failed, we might try it again and do better.
In other words, the fall is a crucial moment. It teaches us something, something that can only be learned by experimentation.
So here’s my new mantra – it’s one I know many of my filmmaker friends live by: fall forward.
What it says is that every time you play, you aim to do something a little more fun, a little more terrifying. Get out of your comfort zone. Even if you fall, you fall forward. It’s not a failure. It’s a learning experience.
It gets better.
This approach borrows from the art of screenwriting. The first draft of a screenplay is usually known as “the bad version”, because it’s a rigorously unpolished rendering of an idea that begs to be trashed, or improved upon.
You can’t be sure until you see it first, right?
Designers like myself also know this approach intimately by a process known as “prototyping”. In prototyping, the goal is to make the roughest and quickest drafts possible. This way, you can explore different options and make important decisions very early on in the process, saving you time and effort later.
When I wrote this article, I went through at least a dozen rounds of edits before settling on the version you are reading now.
This approach of working and reworking is what leads to greatness (or, in entrepreneur-speak, success).
Remember to Play.
The thing is, we all already know this approach very intimately. We know this as a kid, which is to play.
Filmmaking is play. The same way design is play, or business, or coding. They’re all grown-up versions of play.
So here’s my advice, if you are a grown-up that has forgotten to learn by playing:
Never be afraid to take the leap.
The secret is in doing it. Just jump. You’ll have more fun this way.
Should you fall, at least you’ll fall forward.
Want more? Follow @JUMPTHECUT on Twitter.
