FAILURE: THE SECRET WEAPON TO SUCCESS
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FAILURE
Failure is the path to success - so long as it doesn't take you out of the game.
Failure can be one of the greatest teachers in the creative industries, whether you’re an actor, writer, director or producer. But only so long as it doesn’t take you out of the game.
A better way to view failure comes from someone who knows alot about taking risks and failing: Denzel Washington. He suggests that failure is a required part of success and a sign that you are truly taking risks. A sentiment that many other people have echoed over the centuries. Denzel encourages artists to “Fail Big” and to “Fall Forward”. Rather than let the failure represent the end and discourage you, use it as growth and development on the road to the goal.
Creative work is built through iteration. We try something in acting, writing, directing, producing. It doesn’t quite work. So we learn, adjust and try again. Failure isn’t the opposite of progress. It’s a vital part of the process. It is only through failure and iteration that we can develop our creative capacities and ultimately serve the story we are telling.
The point isn’t to celebrate failure for its own sake. It’s to avoid treating failure as a verdict on our ability. Rather, to use it as information. What did it teach you? What would you do differently? What can you take forward?
This mindset is particularly important when developing a creative vision. Failure doesn’t necessarily mean you got it wrong. Sometimes it means you’ve discovered a better way to get where you’re going. This is what happens in the world of building a product. The first prototype isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s designed to get the ball rolling, so that on the way you can start working on what doesn’t work, while retaining that which does. All experiences can be markers pointing forward to where you need to head. If you have that approach and mindset.
Creative failure must be survivable. In Film, TV and theatre a massive failure can put the entire company at risk. One of the most high profile examples of this was Cleopatra (1963), which nearly brought down 20th Century Fox. The budget ballooned from $20m to almost $400m(!) in today’s numbers. To put that in context, until the release of Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides in 2011, Cleopatra remained the most expensive film ever made (inflation adjusted). Paradoxically, Cleopatra was also the highest grossing film of 1963, bringing in $71m worldwide. Yet it was not until 1973, 10 years later, that Fox officially declared the film had broken even. While Cleopatra eventually recouped it’s investment, it was far too late to prevent an immediate hit to the studio. In order to avoid bankruptcy and play the long game with the film’s profitability, Fox had to shut down production facilities, implement mass layoffs and sell a massive 260 acre portion of it’s Los Angeles backlot which would eventually become the modern commercial district of Century City.
So long as the budget won’t kill the studio or production company, then a failure in commercial or critical terms can be a learning moment, that ultimately strengthens the studio and the creatives attached. The idea is to build a creative environment where you can afford to fail, learn and try again.
A great recent example of this is the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. When the first trailer for the live-action Sonic was released, audiences reacted strongly to the character’s design. Rather than dismiss the criticism and double down, the filmmakers and studio went back to the drawing board and redesigned Sonic.
You can see the before-and-after here:
As a result the film grossed $320m worldwide against an estimated $87m budget (a 4x multiple - which is phenomenal). It created audience buy in and loyalty, which has spawned a franchise where the box office has increased - Sonic 2 generated $405m worldwide and Sonic 3 $492m worldwide.
There was no guarantee that changing Sonic would have worked. But taking the time and expense to go back to the drawing board on the first film, using the failure, has caused positive downstream effects. Iterating doesn’t guarantee success, but it increases what you know before making the next decision. The key though is that there must be a feedback loop. You can't just fail for it's own sake. The most important element is the failure ➝ reflection ➝ reflection ➝ adjustment + iteration ➝ the next attempt. There is a difference between creative risk and poor decision making.
That applies just as much to us here at Modern Rituals. Our early pitch decks contained plenty of things we wouldn’t include today. Over time, though failure and iteration we’ve learned what matters to different audiences, whether we are pitching to cast, filmmakers, financiers or partners.
Without all those earlier attempts we wouldn’t have arrived where we are today. We didn’t look at those attempts and come to the decision that we failed. We used a far more useful approach: What did we learn? It’s also one of the questions we usually ask at the end of all our Monthly labs. What did I learn and what am I going to take forward?
The goal is not to avoid failure, but to fail cheaply enough, to learn and adapt and keep moving forward. This is how you build a career over the long term. Constant growth and development, using failure as learning.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
BLACK BOX THINKING
- MATTHEW SYED
Failure isn't the key. Learning from failure is.
Black Box Thinking is a great book to go with this month’s learning. Syed’s core argument is that the biggest contributor to success isn’t down to talent or big breakthroughs, but rather how we systematically learn from failure. Most people and organisations hide mistakes. But in high performing fields like aviation and elite sport, mistakes and failures are brought front and centre. They are recorded, analysed and shared in order that everyone improves.
Hence the title of the book: Black Box Thinking. Aviation is a great example of how failure leads to deep analysis and iteration. This is because the cost is great: human beings. Taking it into our own lives, we should shift our perspective on failure from something shameful to treating it as data. Not as a value judgment on the individual.
The absolute gold from this book is the understanding of closed loop systems (where errors are hidden or spun) with “open-loop” systems (where failures are captured, examined and turned into changes). Utilising this open loop system, progress truly comes from the “marginal gains” that come from honest feedback. They do not arise from a lone-genius, “innate talent from birth” mythology and quantum leaps. They are merely the outputs of a repeatedly practiced system. Put another way, success is the mountaintop position of small, recorded failures that were were used to figure out what doesn’t work.
This is where humility is required.
We all avoid admitting mistakes because it is a threat to our egos and self esteem. We identify our worth with the mistake and so hide it, so that our worth remains intact. But it is this avoidance that stifles learning and growth.If you can’t admit errors, you can’t correct them.
In practice the loops work like this:
Closed Loop: Deny, blame, cover-up —> The same mistakes being repeated.
Open Loop: Record all inputs/outputs, analyse, adapt —> errors become iteration and upgrades
Which one do you think is going to produce more results over the long term?
Syed also establishes that marginal gains compound. Over the short term they don’t seem much, but over the long term they lead to rapid advancement. Small, testable changes, iterated often beat waiting for perfect solutions.
Drawing all this together Syed has 4 rules that you must start implementing in your productions, artistic careers and lives:
Change a little
Rather than looking for a gigantic leap, focus on 1% change a day. This will compound over the long term, creating a net percentage change of 3,678.34% over the course of the year.
Make loops open
Record all data truthfully without value judgment. Otherwise mistakes will be repeated.
Try, try again
If you at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But make sure it is an iterative process. You can repeatedly fail at the wrong thing. An oft attributed quote to Churchill, but which is not his: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
No blame, no shame
If there is a culture of punishment for mistakes and unsuccessful ideas, teams will become risk averse. If someone has the courage to say things how they really are, there must be no consequences or blow back so long as they weren't incompetent at their job. Making it safe to report errors is what saves time and money in the long term.
Watch an interview with Matthew Syed where he talks in detail about many of these concepts:
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