Pushing Through
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
From a very young age, we are taught to fear failure. We are taught that failure is unacceptable and when you fail, you’re an unsuccessful person. Failure is portrayed as a sign of weakness, a sign of stupidity, and a sign of laziness. While failure should not be a team’s goal, some incredibly important lessons can only be learned through trial and error, which inevitably involves failure. A healthy fear of failure can motivate us within our corporate and personal lives to do things right the first time. A healthy fear means that failure need not be something that stops us in our tracks, but rather a vehicle by which we can learn important business lessons and grow our minds. Failure should be feared, but don’t let failure stop you in your tracks. If one has not failed, they aren’t pushing themselves hard enough, taking the necessary risks to get to the next level. The dichotomy of failure presents itself: fail to learn, learn not to fail.
It is not possible to have a team or organization that never fails. This would be a direct contradiction to human nature. At birth, humans are not geniuses, but individuals with capability to become intelligent individuals. Humans are transformational creatures who learn from their experiences, their culture, and the world at large. Our character, our knowledge, and our capacity as creative, knowledgeable and professional individuals are developed through our mistakes, our screw ups, and our successes. While we are acknowledged for our successes, we’re defined by how we react and recover from our failures. The only way that we can grow as individuals, designers, creatives, thinkers, teachers, is to fail, acknowledge our failure, mitigate backlash, and take steps to move beyond the failure. Failure is a way to get feedback, grow, learn, and hopefully not repeat the same mistake expecting a different result (that’s the definition of insanity!). Failure can sometimes be just the spark that you needed to get or create something extraordinary.
A mindset in which failure doesn’t matter at all, fosters a community where laziness and inefficiency may become the norm. The fear of failure is beneficial to the process as it motivates us to create the best work that we possibly can. Not only can we learn from our failures, but the failures of others. Stories of failed companies are a model for what not to do and provide us with critical insight into what went wrong and how we may be able to avoid it. Getting knocked down is just part of doing research and developing products, getting back up is where people see what kind of worker, individual, and human you are.
Renaissance polymath Leonardo Da Vinci once said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” So where to next? We must ask ourselves, what am I providing to consumers? How can I make it complex in nature but beautifully simplistic in design? We live in a world where immediacy is a requirement. The faster and more immediately someone understands a product or message, the greater chance you have on getting them to use it. In our fast-paced world, people don’t have time for more than a 140 character tweet. In fact, most people don’t even take the 3 seconds it takes to read the tag on a retail shelf let alone read or watch an ad. How on earth do you get your message through? Un-clutter you content. If you want to be noticed in a content-driven world, be ruthlessly simple. We live in an era of over-information, a world where the more information you place within your brand message the less notice it gets. Simplicity and truth are the only advertising techniques proven to work time and time again. It is much easier to be complex than to be simple. Simplicity, in its most sophisticated and concrete form, is valued when content and design are interwoven flawlessly to the point that the consumer doesn’t realize they’re reading an ad or interacting with a brand because they are gaining immediate value.
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful,” says John Madea, a Japanese-American graphic designer. Customers want powerful products, but powerful usually is misunderstood as complicated. You can achieve both power and simplicity through the art of balance. Balance within design works as a vehicle of visual equilibrium and brings the ideas of design, function, and utility together as one. Driving your core design, balance is essential to creating unity and utility. There’s a natural tendency to always want to add more features to the system or product. Say no by default and ask yourself, are these features really necessary to meet your goals? Will these features hurt or help your product? How can we make this even simpler and easier to use?
