“Failure’s such a creative gift”

Austin Kleon has great advice. Live in such a way that you insulate yourself from both success and failure. For creatives, this is about stabilization.

The idea is to find a way to make a living — somewhere, somehow — that’s enough to fuel your creative work. 

This way you can experiment. You have the latitude to fail. Because in time those experiments will lead to successes.

Here’s a valuable thought on failure, excerpted from an article in The Week on the death of contemporary Christian music, quoting producer Matt Bronleewe (who’s worked with a number of successful musical artists, from Michael W. Smith to Nashville‘s Hayden Panettiere):

As the music industry began to weather the disruptions of the digital market, labels grew much warier of those kinds of risks, says Bronleewe. 

“There’s not much room to fail anymore,” he explains. “And failure’s such a creative gift. When the ability to fail is taken away, it fuels a lot of fear. It narrows the pool of producers and writers to such a degree that there’s a sameness that starts to occur.”

When failure doesn’t sink you financially, you’re unstoppable. Only you can stop you. And we know you won’t quit you, right?

For you —

Evan Griffith
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