Failure is a False Construct
As I began writing this month’s blog, several events happened that are considered important markers in my artistic field of documentary filmmaking. The annual Sundance Film Festival took place. Often considered the kickoff to the North American film festival season, it is no small achievement to get your film into this prestigious festival that has historically helped documentaries, in particular, find distribution, get into many other film festivals, and help launch or revive careers.
A few weeks later, in the midst of what is known as “awards season,” the Oscars took place. While the average person may see them as little more than a place for celebrities to wear pretty attire and pat themselves on the back, for the folks involved behind the cameras and computers that make the movies what they are, winning or even being nominated for an Academy Award is an accolade that can lead to the next project and career step.
While premiering at Sundance or winning an Oscar or achieving some accolade in other creative disciplines may be viewed as a worthy goal, the chances of achieving these types of successes are quite small. Sundance receives more than 15,000 submissions and has fewer than 250 program spots, so most submissions stand less than a 2% chance of making it into the festival.
So what does it mean if…
Your film doesn’t premiere at Sundance or doesn’t win an Oscar;
You are never awarded a prestigious grant to support your creative work;
Publishers pass on your book;
A gallery show falls through;
Your play reading gets a lot of strong criticism;
Only five people show up for your concert;
You struggle with being creatively stuck;
You struggle with your own confidence about whether your work is any good;
You struggle with other aspects of your life getting in the way of moving forward.
YOU ARE A FAILURE.
Even if those are painful words to read, it is quite likely that they or some variation of them have crossed your mind at some point. They certainly have crossed mine many times. I’ve faced my share of rejections (or, even worse, silence) from funders, film festivals, job applications. If you don’t believe me, here is an image of various actual rejection notes from film festivals for the first film I ever produced.
A collage of actual rejection notes that the author received for her first film. There are only so many words that can convey “thanks but no thanks!”
I’ve worked on projects that needed to be jumpstarted again and again. Heck, I even failed to get this monthly blog out in the month it was supposed to go out (are you silently judging?)
Yup, I have failed many many times over. So much so that I have decided to own it.
I AM A FAILURE.
And that is OK. In fact, it is great!
For some reason, in the creative fields, we tend to think of “failure” as a word with negative connotations, positioning it as the opposite of “success.”
As artists, it also ties into equating our product with our self. If our product doesn’t make it through a gatekeeping process or doesn’t get bought by the consumer or we are unhappy with it in some way, that can be converted into thinking we are the losers because we can’t even make a product that “wins.”
Yet artists need to be bold and creative.
While there is no single definition of creativity, generally it involves making something or the ability to create. In the dictionary.com definition creativity is defined as “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.” Looking for the word “success” there? You won’t find it.. You won’t find “failure” either, but it sure will find you.
Artists need to borrow from our counterparts in the sciences where creativity and innovation is also an asset. In science, failure is essential in research and experiments. It is simply information that allows science to move forward by ruling out particular conclusions, so that scientists can move on and test other hypotheses through different approaches or conditions. Sometimes this form of failure can lead science in incredible new directions or a new hypothesis. Albert Einstein famously said “Failure is success in progress.” Thomas Edison put it another way, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
This also means that sometimes we need to know when to cut our losses, and do what the working world refers to as “failing forward.” Sometimes you just need to cease working on something that is not moving forward and may, in fact, be holding you back. I have done this too. Ideas that never morphed into works. Works that took so long that I had outgrown them and decided I needed to leave them behind as learning experiences rather than completed projects. When I was Executive Director of Docs In Progress, I reveled in the process of piloting programs to see which ones could be further honed and which ones might not be the best use of our resources.
Accepting failure also means accepting imperfection, something that can be challenging for many of us. In addition to being willing to accept failure, that also means accepting that some of our creative output may be good, but not great, or that we also need to redefine how we view success. That’s a topic for another blog, but in the meantime, let’s all revel in our failures.
What was a time you failed and it lead to something different, maybe even better?
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