No-one likes dry turkey.
For Christmas this year I was very kindly given a copy of a book by Erik Kessels called Failed It! How to turn mistakes into ideas and other advice for successfully screwing up and it got me thinking a little bit about what creative failure means to me right now.
In my head there is something about a fear of faliure that is embedded quite deeply and it’s a hard thing to shake.
To fail is to fall short of success or achievement in something expected, and at the moment that ‘expected’ just happens to be a successful long-term career as a graphic designer. I’m not trying to be dramatic, failing at this for me would mean a lot of wasted time, energy and money.
This self-inflicted fear is compounded by the great work that I look at every day on Behance, It’s Nice That and Instagram — it’s a visual cacophony and who’s-who of talented and (note) successful graphic designers and artists. Everywhere I look the apparent success of others is lathered over me like gravy on a slow-basting turkey. Okay, so maybe I just stop judging myself on others, switch off my screen and focus on my own work… but what if I start to dry out? No-one, but no-one likes dry turkey.
Dry turkey aside, I think fear of faliure can also be considered a fear of looking stupid. Nobody wants to make bad work that reads terribly, looks shit and could easily have been made by a first year college student before lunch break on a Tuesday. You want to look clever, to have strong concepts, to have visual style and panache. You want to be noticed, to be seen and most importantly (thanks Instagram) to be liked.
I mean there’s nothing worse than posting something online and receiving one sympathy like from a close-friend, or god-forbid a family relative. In this scenario you’d engage the delete button, chalk it up as a mistake from a button mash and forget the whole sordid thing ever happened.
The previous three paragraphs of self-inflicted fear mongering is precisely why this was such a good present.
To get back to Erik Kessels, the book is a small little bible on why we need to cheer up, let out hair down and embrace out inner stupid. There is only one thing that is worse than failure and that is to be boring. Being boring is dull, tiresome, and uncongenial, and making boring work is the audio equivalent of Ed Sheeran.
To be a failure, to look stupid, to screw up and get zero likes is something to seek out and embrace. It’s the photograph that looks better upside down, it’s the food that tastes better when you add too much soy sauce, it’s the music that you make when you step the distortion up to 11 on a ukelee. And for design? It’s time I started forgetting about perfection, comparing myself to others on Behance and wholeheartedly embrace my fear of faliure.
And with a little help from Erik, I think I might just succeed.
