Today we return to a series we’ve been developing on the Zen of writing. We started by examining the aspiration to achieve flow while writing, then looked at how we can build a scaffold to afford flow, then looked at how to implement that scaffold under less than ideal circumstances. We refer to these ideas in many of our other posts as well. Today we acknowledge and explore an important part the journey to flow: failure.
Most cultural scripts train us to avoid failure at all costs. Even though most people agree that tying and failing essential for getting good at anything, we nevertheless shrink away from failure when things get hard. These scripts make dwelling on failure and its lessons seem defeatist or scary. It need not be. Reflection on failure is one of the best ways to prevent the catastrophic, damaging kind of failure and to encourage the safer, educational kind.
To make any progress, we must interrogate the cultural scripts and mindsets around failure.
Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset
There are two mindsets around any kind of skilled performance: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.
In the fixed mindset, we treat our key traits—intelligence, sensitivity, creativity—as immutable. The natural consequence of this is that we don’t want to show others our lack of skill when it counts, in case we don’t measure up. So we get very cautious and perfectionistic.
In the growth mindset, we treat the same traits as things we can develop with patience and persistence. Success is an opportunity to refine our traits. Failure is an even better opportunity to refine them, since it typically sends a much stronger signal.
All the research we know shows that the growth mindset is a more accurate description of reality than the fixed mindset. While skill, talent, and aptitude are not distributed equally, any given skill is more malleable than it might appear. But while the growth mindset is more accurate, the fixed mindset is more pervasive.
This is probably because of few factors: a test-based model of education, the fact that the media shows us the products of incredibly skilled people (actors, musicians, writers) without showing us the process by which they got those skills, explaining skill by talent or genius, and many more tendencies. We may explore these stories in future posts.
To learn, develop, and refine our skills, we must resist the fixed mindset whenever possible. How do we do that? In a slogan: we must learn to fail safely.
Failing Safely
It might seem odd to bring failure and safety together. Cultivating a sense that it’s OK to risk and fail is a long-term project. Much of it involves unearthing and challenging cultural scripts that reinforce the fixed mindset around writing. We write about draft 0 and draft -1 a fair amount because we think starting there, rather than at draft 1, is an important piece of making space within yourself for experimentation, re-negotiation, and reworking. Writing draft -1 makes the stakes are nearly non-existent, so there’s almost no such thing as failure. The stakes are a bit higher with every subsequent draft. At some point, your drafts may become public, at which point the cost of failure increases.
Having a solid drafting practice allows us to write those half-baked, incomplete, fragmentary, not-quite-sure thoughts, and then to select and remix them as appropriate. We should do most of our failing there. In tour private, early drafts you can let the failure flow along with the success, surprise, and excitement! And the more we work and rework, the more public failure becomes a teacher rather than a mortifying experience.
Editors like us work as midwives for moving between the personal realm and the public realm. We’re here to offer you feedback, which raises the stakes for you, but in a non-judgmental and non-public way. Being writers ourselves, we know in our bones what the stakes are.
When we look at prolific writers, we often wonder how they can turn out so much quality content. Rest assured that all of them have harrowing stories of failure in their biographies. But they survived and even thrived. You can too. It starts with owning a piece of our fear of failure. What is a first step you can take along the path of learning to fail safely?