AIC Stories 037 - AIC Original S136 - Failing Forward

While success in our creative endeavors feels great, it’s actually the act of failing that brings us the most potential for larger long term success. It’s the act of “Failing Forward”.
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I was chatting with my good friend Vincent, from the Because We Make Podcast and his fantastic website that includes a shop you really should bookmark and buy from, and he was telling me about a project he had been working on that pretty much bombed at the end of the day. It was using a material that can be a bit unpredictable and finicky, and at the end of the day it just fizzled and failed. 

But he wasn’t feeling upset or down like many of us would when we fail. In fact, he felt like he learned a ton from the project, even with it’s failure, and when I told him that the project was still a success because of that he agreed. In his words he had to just keep “Failing Forward”, because we don’t learn anything from the successes. 

Well, that’s not totally true… There is POTENTIAL to learn from success, but only if you can manage to approach it mentaly so that you don’t just end up patting yourself on the back or stroking your ego. If you can manage to step back and analyze the success the same way you analyze the failure and find things to learn about the process, it lets you add more knowledge to the old noggin for the next project. But it’s usually very difficult to pull anything super useful from the successes, Vincent is not wrong. 

But by embracing the Failing Forward mentality, having the ability to reset after a faiure to take stock of what actually went wrong. Seek out the things that worked well even if the rest flopped, and then figuring out how to do things differently for the next attempt, and you’ll be making progress towards mastery of your craft. No matter how big or small the steps forward are, as long as you are making progress, you are succeeding. 

So fail forward and WHEN you succeed take time to keep progressing forward as you learn how to improve upon what you’ve already done. Remember, failure isn’t the end. It’s just one more step forward in the long march toward mastery of your craft. 

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