The Key to Creative Success: Embracing the Inevitability of Failure

Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, emphasizes that there’s nothing more useless than someone who comes to the end of the day and congratulates himself, saying, “Well, I made it through the day without screwing up.” People who fear failure expend every effort to ensure that they don’t screw up. By avoiding the inevitable pain that goes along with screwing up, we also avoid the inevitable shame linked with all those mistakes. That avoidance puts a severe damper on our ability (and certainly our inclination) to generate new and original ideas.

Creativity Is Not About Perfection

But, let’s take that idea one step further and agree that failure is painful, and putting our failures out for public display may only deepen the pain. But, when we deny or avoid the inevitable failures that go along with any professional enterprise, we only make things worse. We discount the learning and growth that should result from that acknowledgment. In a business environment, this has critical ramifications, since an executive’s behavior is often the standard employees use for their own model of behavior. If a business leader is unable or unwilling to acknowledge their failures—in other words, they do not make any mistakes—then it is likely employees will be inclined to do the same. However, creativity is never about perfection; it is more about effort and desire. No one may do anything perfectly the first, or second, or even third time they attempt it. Hiccups, bumps, and bruises (e.g., mistakes) are inevitable with any new venture or innovative design. If a leader doesn’t accept that inevitability, her staff will infer that mistakes are bad and will eschew creative enterprises or endeavors—avoiding risks at all costs. The result: institutional stagnation.

Consider this dynamic exercise developed by creativity researcher Bob McKim. He gathered an audience of adults and provided each person with a drawing instrument (pen or pencil) and a blank sheet of paper. He then invited each of the participants to turn to their neighbor and spend 30 seconds drawing a portrait of that individual. As you might imagine, almost everyone was immediately uncomfortable; they offered apologies, made lots of excuses, and downplayed any artistic talent. Snickers, guffaws, and laughter filled the room during the entire 30-second exercise.

At the end of the 30 seconds, McKim asked each person to show her or his drawing to the individual who served as the model. The results were to be expected. Almost everyone made excuses for their lack of artistic talent. They were embarrassed by the caricatures they created. They feigned smiles as they timidly presented their illustrations. They wondered (often aloud) what their partners would think about their apparent lack of artistic creativity.

Children, as McKim discovered, had the opposite reaction to this exercise. They enthusiastically embraced it. They smiled, they laughed, and they demonstrated a sincere sense of accomplishment and authorship when sharing their sketches. They were proud of their creativity. The adults—not so much!

Embracing Failure

Source: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

As children, we have little fear of failure. Over time, however, it often becomes part of our personality. Being yelled at when we miss a winning free throw, being berated when we get more than four words incorrect on the weekly spelling test, and being dismissed every time we come up with a new idea furthers the development of a fear of failing. That fear hampers our creative impulses. And, if we are afraid of making mistakes we will also be afraid to invent, create, and innovate.

That’s true of ourselves as it is of any commercial enterprise. Southwest Airlines, known for its innovative business models, thrives on a simple motto: “Risk more. Fail faster.” Sochiro Honda, founder of Honda, once said, “Success is 99 percent failure.” And, Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, stated that the way to accelerate your success is to double your failure rate. Quite obviously, the intent is not to focus on the mistakes. They’re not the goal after all. They are inevitable consequences of a creative mind, so the object is to get through them quickly in our search for an innovation or new idea. Fear of those inevitable mistakes puts the brakes on our creativity and dims our desire to do something new, something different.

To illustrate this concept further, let’s look at the sports page of the daily newspaper. Here is where we expect failure and even reward failure. For example, we say that a professional baseball player who has a .300 (or better) batting average is having a good season. That means that that player has gotten three hits for every 10 times he’s been at bat. But, let’s look at that statistic from the other side: The player has made an out seven out of the 10 times he has been up to bat. Examine that statistic in educational terms and you’ll note that the player received a 30 percent on his annual batting exam (over the span of 162 games).

Thirty percent, and he’s considered to have a good year!

James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner, puts it this way: "We’re all taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually."

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A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

–George Bernard Shaw