On Failure

There's a really great essay about failure over at The Artful Writer blog.

It's certainly not uncommon to read about the lack of success in this business but this piece is especially timely for me (see my recent post). Failure happens to be one of those subjects that has for a long time both hindered and motivated me and there's a reason for this.

I submitted portfolios to Walt Disney Feature Animation twice a year, for four long years before finally being accepted into the company's Character Animation Internship. That's a whole lot of failure. When I wasn't spending weekends drawing at the zoo, filling sketchbooks with cafe drawings, or writing letters to the current manager of training, I was amassing large amounts of written inspiration to keep me going.

And now -- more than eight years later -- I find myself relying once again on that inspiration.

So, in the spirit of the thread started by Craig Mazin, I have selected to list here some of the more powerful comments that I've unearthed on the subject of "not succeeding":


"Failure is the opportunity to start over again - more intelligently"
-Henry Ford

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm"
-Winston Churchill

"To those in need of encouragement, remember this: Beware of quitting too soon. Dr. Seuss' first children's book was rejected by 23 publishers. The 24th publisher sold 6 million copies"

"Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unrewarded talent. Education alone will not: the world is full of educated failures. Persistence alone is omnipotent"
-Calvin Coolidge

"It's all about keeping at it. If you work at it long enough, and learn from your mistakes, eventually something is going to happen"
-Roger Avary

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit"
-Richard Bach

It's important to remember that each one of the individuals listed above has, in my book, been enormously successful, and every one of them appears to advocate "coming up short" once in a while. Heck, some even praise it. Growing up, I was always suprised by the amount of people out there who resented the enormous success of a Michael Jackson, a Michael Eisner or a Michael Jordan but I would venture to guess that very few of those people ever witnessed the countless times those guys slipped and bashed their face as they clawed their way up the career ladder. I read recently that Stephen King got rejected 75 times before he got published. That's probably a lot fewer rejections than most writers get . . .

I'm not sure who said it, but there's another great quote which reads:

"A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed -- it is a sign that he tried to surpass himself"

I hope that the above quotations serve in some way to enhance your outlook on life. Wisdom like this has been a pretty invaluable thing to have it in front of me when things get frustrating.