I had a professor in one of my painting classes who always gave everyone the highest mark possible. From the struggling students to the almost-pros, our grades were almost exactly the same - 100/100.

Of course, chronic absentees were another question - but the lowest they’d get was 80%. This made everyone happy as it made them feel like their work was appreciated, and that there was finally a teacher who didn’t pour her bitterness at us by trashing our work. Cool, right?

Well, no.

It seemed that our happiness was short-lived. My classmates and I stopped doing our best, knowing we were going to be rewarded with high marks anyway. Many of us even stopped showing up, content with the 80% final grade we’d get from our professor. Her attempt to encourage us actually discouraged us.

After thinking about this myself and talking to my other classmates, I realized that our lack of enthusiasm came from three things:

1. Our mistakes, weaknesses, and laziness barely had any consequences.
2. The hardworking students weren’t happy about being rewarded on the same level as those who didn’t exert any effort.
3. We weren’t given any direction.

Now, one could argue that there were consequences to our mistakes, including (but not limited to) artistic stagnation. Also, why would you need a teacher to give you direction? Aren’t you supposed to find that out for yourself?

First of all, students in their late teens and early twenties don’t usually look at long term, intangible consequences of their actions. Who cares about artistic stagnation at 19? Especially if you’re trying to juggle school, work, a social life, and all the drama that comes with being young and uncertain. What we needed were consequences right now. Otherwise, it’d be too late when we learn the lesson.

As for direction, being self-directed is wonderful and rewarding, but not if there’s no third party pointing out the stuff you missed because of familiarity blindness.

That’s why there are editors. The writer knows what she’s trying to do with a story, but can her readers infer this from her work? For this reason, I’ve always felt that editors were there to find the balance between the purity of a writer’s work and the ability of the reader to understand it. They’re not there just to make you feel like an untalented hack, even if they might give off that impression.

Our kindhearted professor may have had good intentions, but by giving everyone perfect praise she left out one of the most crucial elements of creative work - criticism.

Everyone who makes anything creative has to face critics. If you really can’t stand this kind of criticism, especially for the work that seems so personal to you, then you’re faced with two choices:

1. Either do something creative and let people trash it; or
2. look for something risk-free and painless then choose that be your life’s work instead. Just leave creative work to the masochists.

Which choice are you willing to live with?

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

We’re all afraid of failing. We dread critics, seek the praise of our peers, and crave spotless records. We think that to be happy, productive citizens, we have to avoid failure as much as possible.

Who can blame us? In school we were taught to be ashamed if the teacher marks a giant red “X” on our test paper. When I was growing up, my mother would even slap my wrists (or burn my stuff, depending on her mood) whenever I made mistakes. We were taught that failure is the enemy of success, and to have the latter, you can’t have the former.

But once we step out into the real world, we know that it’s impossible to keep failure out of our lives.  In fact, it’s an important part of success. They aren’t mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to creative work.

Image by massdistraction via Flickr

The truth is, while you’re creating, the quality of work that you’re striving for is more important than the quality you’ve achieved. Worrying about the final product should only come when you’re actually working on the final product.  First drafts and sketches are just an exploration of an idea.  Mistakes are okay.  Misspellings are fine.  After all, you’re the only one who’s going to ever read it.

Thinking this way prevents stagnation, pushes you to grow, and prevents you from being too pressured by perfectionism. It’s just a draft. It’s not the measure of your merit as an artist.

This doesn’t just apply to writing - but you already know that.  For the past week, I’ve been doing quick crappy sketches of my cats, found objects, and imaginary things.  A waste of pen and paper?  Maybe.  But I like to think of it as an exercise in failure.

Epic FAIL!

One of the downsides of popularizing the use of “fail” as a noun is that people immediately point their fingers at things they don’t like and yell “FAIL”.  Although doing this has its uses (such as in the humorous FAILblog), I see people use it all the time when commenting on blog posts or artwork online.  In that context, it really doesn’t qualify as criticism. I rarely see this word followed up with an explanation about why something “fails”.

Have you ever encountered anyone writing “That-idea-was-better-explored-by-Thomas-Friedman FAIL”? Or how about the paradoxical “Proper-word-usage FAIL”?  Of course not. That word is meant to be an insult, not something you can actually learn from - a far cry from the real role of failure in creative work.

So what is the role of failure and why should we embrace it?

First, it allows us to create freely without being burdened by perfection. Many people want to write a novel but they never try because they feel they won’t be the next Hemingway. That’s a silly reason. The greatest writers in history probably had no idea they’d be labeled as such. In fact, they probably envied their peers, not knowing they were good in their own right. These people just made stuff while the results took care of themselves.

Another reason is that we’ll realize the weight of the creative process and learn to endure it. It took me only a couple of days to read Jeanette Winterson’s “The Passion”. Did it take her a couple of days to write that? No, but it’s easy to think that way.  Mass media bombards us with well-lit soft focus montages of writers working through the night and handing in a finished manuscript by morning. This makes it easy to believe that creative work is magical and inspired, so when we get to do it for ourselves and realize that it’s not as glamorous as we thought it would be, we feel like we’re doing something wrong.

Producing great (or even competently made) art takes time. Failure helps us realize this. When we get used to it enough, we’ll be more resilient to the obstacles we face during the creative process.

Now, let’s fail…

If you want to exercise failure for yourself, here are some great tools you can start with:

One Word - You will spend 60 seconds writing about the site’s word for the day.  When I took it for a test drive, the word I wrote about was “after”.  I’m going to try using this every day before I start working so I can get the creativity flowing.  It’s a good tool if you want to work on something unexpected and random.

Write or Die - Also known as Dr. Wicked’s Writing Lab, this tool “punishes” you if you don’t write a certain amount of words within your selected time frame (from 10 minutes to 2 hours).

Pen and paper - Whatever happened to the good ‘ol pen and paper?  They don’t deserve to die like the abacus or the fax machine. This tool is all about writing (and perhaps a bit of doodling). You won’t be able to say “Oh I can play just one game of Spider Solitaire”.

Stick with legal pad and an ordinary pen.  Nothing brings out the paralyzing writing phobia like beautiful linen paper and a $100 fountain pen.

Typewriter - What I love about the typewriter is that erasing is a chore. You have to pause what you’re doing, grab the white-out, apply it, wait for it to dry… you get the point. If you let your mistakes sit there and just go with the flow of what you’re doing, there’s a better chance that you’ll keep going and let the editing come later.

Yes, whatever you write using these tools will probably be shitty.  Just let go and give yourself the license to churn out crap during these exercises.  At least you’re churning out something, which is far better than sitting around waiting for the perfect idea to happen (it won’t).

What are you waiting for? Go forth and FAIL, people!

Remember when I listed my goals for December?  There’s one goal that I didn’t accomplish, and this left me disappointed for a while.  See, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to write 16 articles for Web Worker Daily for December.  I only wrote 11.

What went wrong?

Theoretically, it was possible.  I just moved some things around in my Google Calendar and thought, rather naively, that I could do 16 articles for Web Worker Daily in December.

Here’s where the problem lies: the goal was focused on the quantity of the work I wanted to produce.  The goal wasn’t about “tackling more challenging issues” or “doing an interview with a mentor”.  Even if I had shifted my internal priorities to produce quality work, my external perception of improvement still depended on quantity.

Notice the wording of my goals: “Write 16 articles for Web Worker Daily.”  This is followed by a few paragraphs on how I plan to improve the quality of my work.  Obviously that has nothing to do with the number of articles I should produce.  Duh.  Was that stupid or what?

What ended up happening was that as I was working on each article, I kept wanting it to be better, but this meant spending more time on improvement rather than churning out extra articles (Note: I guess how one can measure quality is another story).  This made me end up 5 articles short of my “goal”.

Some lessons on goal setting:

In brief bullet points, here’s what I learned from the experience:

• Don’t set goals just because. Know the reason why you want to accomplish a goal and use that as your fuel.  It’s not about crossing things off a list, it’s about committing to your passions.
• Be careful with your phrasing. Make sure it reflects what you really want to accomplish, as opposed to a simple knee-jerk statement based on old, irrelevant ways of measuring success.
• Use the calendar, don’t let it use you. I’ve also learned that using the month as my time frame tends to be too short.  Based on experience, I have success with daily, weekly, quarterly, and 3-year goals.  Sure, I can break up those goals into months, but some of my goals are a bit more long term than that.  What really works is setting milestones and scheduling them at a realistic pace, forgetting about man-made time structures like months and years.  This means I might still be in between milestones come the end of the month. It’s the tasks that come first, not the way the calendar is arranged.

That’s it then.  Now it’s time for me to work on those milestones.

Image by Sam from Sxc.hu