Episode Details

Failure
There are a few different types of failure:
Low-level; these are the daily upsets and letdowns.
Mid-level; they sting for like a week or a month.
High-level; getting fired, getting divorced, these are life changing and really can be cause for a lot of introspection.

Let’s start with a good quote, that’s how all good podcasts start, right?
“People who succeed are people who failed but they keep going anyway.”

Examples:
Mohammad Ali. He lost his first fight and then, after the fight, was claiming that he would be the heavyweight champion of the world.
Michael Jordan, didn’t make his 10th grade basketball team. This failure is the impetus of his success. This is what lit his inner fire.
Babe Ruth, he had the home run record and the strike out record at the same time. He went for it everytime, it was all or nothing. Babe Ruth was so confident that he would point over the fence to say he was about to hit a homerun before going to bat.

7:07
Low-Level Failures

When Lee started art school he came to it really without any experience drawing or painting. The first 3 or 4 terms were kind of rough. Every day Lee would sulk into class and he would have done his best on his paintings and then would look at what everyone else had done and he knew that he wasn’t at their level yet. It was a daily failure, for the first couple of terms. It was tough and he really struggled with it; it was quite disheartening. He came up with a way to get through it:
He was going to do 100 paintings and the wouldn’t start being judgmental of his work until he hit 100 paintings. He would keep tick marks on a sheet until he got to 100 and by the time he got there he was way better and more confident. By 100 paintings Lee was starting to find his stride and get pretty good, at that point at least it wasn’t daily failure.

One problem we have is that we look at failures as failures. We have also been conditioned to not look at trying and failing as a learning and forward moving experience. Everything in school is all about moving up, what grades did you get? Were you right or wrong? We’ve been conditioned to not use trial and error for learning. In school we don’t get a good grade for trying and failing. All the results we see with report cards are all about moving up. That conditions us in a bad way for being artists. That model is good for math, it’s either right or wrong, but with a painting there is not just a right or wrong way, sometimes you have to wipe the paint off and redo the painting but that failure was apart of the successful journey.

Will once had a student and they wouldn’t try anything with paint and were so afraid to make a bad mark, they were paralyzed. Will thinks that this was because they weren’t ever rewarded for trying and failing.

12:30
Be 100 Percent Responsible

Participation awards, now in youth sports there are always participation rewards, but kids know it is a game and there are actually winners. They know who won and who lost.

There is another way to categorize failures:
Caused by you, and your choices
Caused by others, and their choices
Caused by external forces.

You can’t always control the outcome of the failure however, your reaction to failure is up to you.
Typically Jake’s goal, regardless of what caused the failure, he tries to take as much responsibility as possible for what happened, or for fixing the situation moving forward. Hopefully that’s the lesson from any sort of failure, you’ve learned something, if it didn’t work you can check it off your list, okay this didn’t work, and then you can keep moving forward.

No matter what happened you can check it off your box, whether or not you caused the failure. You don’t have to be a victim, you can choose learn, and then move forward.

15:00
Test Your Hypotheses

Art and life really is a