What I Learned From Failure
I am highly successful at failure. Seriously. You could say I’m a real mover in the failure industry. I would rank in the Forbes Failure 100, if there were such a thing. I have failed at no less than five career paths, and I even managed to fail at getting cast in a movie that went on to fail famously (The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp — you could call that dodging a silver bullet, I guess).
We already know that we learn from failure. Fall down seven times, get up eight. Michael Jordan missed 9,000 shots. Failure can make you stronger and wiser. Etc. And we know that we must persevere through failure to reach success. (Although I ask, what is success? We’ll talk about that soon.)
In art, you can fail while seeming to succeed and succeed while seeming to fail. The lines blur and, I argue, maybe they blur because those lines don’t matter as much as we pretend.
This is what I have learned. Failure is a spectrum.
It comes in many shapes and by many names. And we must know them and shake hands with them, because they are inevitable, and because at times failure will be the best we as artists can hope for.
A Difference of Vision: When Work is Ahead of its Public
In 1973, Pina Bausch became artistic director of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet. Her style of dance, and her choices of material were not what the audience had come to expect. If you’re familiar with Bausch’s work, you know it’s angular, sometimes violent, sometimes perplexing and always startling.
How did it go? In 2007, she reflected:
“The first years were very difficult. Again and again spectators would leave the auditorium slamming doors, while others whistled or booed. Sometimes we had telephone calls in the rehearsal room with bad wishes. During one piece I went into the auditorium with four people to protect me. I was scared. One newspaper wrote in its review: ‘The music is very beautiful. You can simply shut your eyes.’”
The most remarkable part of this quote to me is the very beginning. “The first years were very difficult.” Not only does this illustrate that she had the perseverance, vision and people to push through, it also shows an arts administration climate where she was allowed to continue and not replaced after one or even several catastrophic attempts.
Bausch said, “I don’t run away when a situation is difficult. I have always kept on working. I couldn’t do it differently. I continued trying to say and do something, which I thought I had to do.”
Although she refined her approach to creating works and how she collaborated with dancers, designers and musicians, she persisted in her vision and the critics and audiences began to follow.
The core truth and approach of the work did not change — the audience had to catch up with it. Today, audiences are deeply invested in the work that they love, to the point of having influence over its creation. While this can create a deep and lasting connection between artist and audience, it can also stifle or even ruin an artist’s work if it isn’t handled with consideration and context. We as artists must trust our vision enough to push through commercial failure, the barbs of critics and, perhaps hardest, the shrieking of social media.
Bausch went on to win accolades the world over and to achieve legendary status in the world of performing arts. Today, that company she took over to such disastrous initial results is known as Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
Looking back on her work, Baush said,
“I always have the feeling that I never achieve what I want to achieve. But no sooner has a premiere passed that I am already making new plans. Where does this power come from? Yes, discipline is important. You simply have to keep working and suddenly something emerges – something very small. I don’t know where that will lead, but it is as if someone is switching on a light. You have renewed courage to keep on working and you are excited again. Or someone does something very beautiful. And that gives you the power to keep on working so hard – but with desire. It comes from inside.”
A Question of Perception: Overcoming the Ego
I joke about failing at career paths. The truth is that each change was far more complex than I probably fully comprehend even today. They could not truthfully be set down as failures.
There are many people who would argue that my so-called failures were the opposite. Who am I to say that acting in multiple feature films and television projects is failure? Or making a living as a musician? Or as a writer?
In both our drive as artists and our nature as humans, we are very quick to transition from the joy of an accomplishment to dissatisfaction at it not being “enough.” The amount of time that passed between my bewildered euphoria at being on set for Walk the Line and quietly complaining about the size of my trailer in the Elvis miniseries was less than a year. How quickly did my excitement over touring as a musician and playing big venues deflate under the reality of touring in a van and not a bus?
Is our current situation the result of failure or of not yet “making it,” or are we unable to rectify the ambition of our ego with our typically pretty fantastic reality? In a conversation recently, an artist friend confessed that he constantly has to fight against an urge to make himself seem more financially and commercially “successful” than he actually is, even though he knows it doesn’t matter. These are the traps we all fall prey to.
In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton writes:
“Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.”
We feel ourselves at this threshold, but don’t know whether we will push through. And we are tortured. When we could simply enjoy the threshold.
We may never “make it,” but if we’re not careful, we’ll look back on a life spent waiting and striving instead of enjoying the stories, work and great food we had along the way.
Holy Grail Syndrome: Perfection is Unattainable
Say it with me. Perfection is unattainable. Write it on your bathroom mirror. Write it in your studio, your rehearsal room, your editing suite and vocal booth.
It is our lot as artists always to fail.
In his prose piece Worstward Ho!, Samuel Beckett wrote one of his most famous passages. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Beckett was outspoken on the subject of failure and of the inevitability of disappointment. A true writer of his generation and geography (he was Irish, spent a lot of time in France, and wrote during the heyday of both Existentialism and Absurdism), he could be a wee bit heavy-handed with the doom and gloom. But he had a clear-eyed, penetrating view of the impossibility of creating a perfect piece.
In Three Dialogues, he says,“to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail … failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.”
Modernist painter William Bailey held a similar, if less dogmatic view. He said, “I never know where I am going with a painting. I only know where I've been, and frankly, I believe that every painter is in a state of continual failure. The only constant in a painter's life is failure.”
No matter how much we train, perfect our techniques, plan, work and rework, the act of creation is ultimately a fool’s errand. To create something that did not previously exist, we must stumble around in the unknown and, ultimately, just hope for the best.
Perfection is unattainable.
Fail Better: Everything is Refinement
Again we look at Beckett’s statement, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
We cannot achieve perfection, yet we also cannot silence the thing inside us that bids us to create. And so we press on, and we make things, and each time we come closer to saying what we want to say, even though we know we’ll never get it said in full.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron says, “There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path.”
There’s no rulebook that says we have to suffer for our art. There’s also no guarantee that it will be easy or effortless. But, we have the agency to shape our experience of the artist’s life.
Only we can decide whether we will be fulfilled by what we have, or disappointed by what we don’t. Only we can direct our vision. Only we can choose whether our efforts succeed or fail.
