Win Fail

“There is no hope of achieving what I want, of expressing my vision of reality. 

I go on painting and sculpting because I am curious to know why I fail.”

Alberto Giacometti

Our culture is obsessed with winning, with success, with triumph.

Sometimes it seems that almost every endeavor comes down to an auction or a competition with numbers, judges, votes…and winners and losers. 

Yet as anyone involved in creative work knows, the role of either success or failure is ambiguous at best.  Commercial failures can be artistic successes, public achievements can be private disappointments, and critical triumphs can be personal disasters.  The real trick in this realm is to keep working – keep making the vision real – in spite of both failures and successes and that is the odd balance we have to put into our Ingenarium.  A kind of win/fail situation that accepts both and pays attention to neither.  The simple fact of the matter is that, in the end, only the successes are remembered.

The manuscript for the novel Ulysses by James Joyce was rejected 22 times before it found a publisher.  To people who do not think they can handle a single rejection of their work, this is heroic.  Yet Joyce found the gumption to submit that one manuscript not just three or four more times but for
the 22^rd time...the one time, as it turned out, that mattered because it rendered all the others irrelevant.

People hearing this story about Ulysses naturally assume that someone like Joyce believed in his own genius and its eventual success and therefore was not bothered by the failures.  But this was not the case.  Joyce was devastated by rejection and destroyed manuscripts in fits of despair.  What he did have was an ability to keep on going in spite of the roadblocks.  As Francis Bacon wrote: “There is no comparison between that which we may lose by not trying and that by not succeeding.”  Being stubborn helps but seeing failure and success as less important than the creative rush is even better.

Like Babe Ruth who, as everyone knows, set a home run record in 1927 that lasted for decades.  Babe Ruth remains in our mythology for that achievement.  But no one ever seems to recall or at least mention the fact that in that exact same year he also set the strikeout record.  The reason that you have to be willing to fail in order to succeed is because failure happens far more often than success.  In this sense, success even depends on failure.

It also helps to keep in mind that there is an important difference between winning and succeeding: you win relative to someone else but you succeed relative to your own expectations.  Most creative people find a way to keep their own expectations afloat in order to keep trying to do what they want to do, despite anyone else’s success or failure.  This is not easy to do – scientists and artists are notoriously jealous of their peers – but it is a useful creative discipline to ignore the ups and downs of judgments and focus instead on the work and how to pursue it. 

Win or lose, succeed or fail, find acceptance or rejection…these are judgments we do not easily ignore and most people, including those working on creative projects in all fields, find this to be a constant struggle.  What we can learn is to be players rather than winners or losers, doers rather than achievers or failers.  Confidence, even false confidence, can help us keep at it and when that is absent, a kind of reckless disregard is next best.

“Do it anyway” is a good motto for this corner of the creative universe and this is the spirit that needs to be added to our Ingenarium.

It does not make creative work any easier; it simply makes it possible in spite of negative outcomes.