30 Goals: 100 Failures

Awhile ago I read a book called Creativity, Inc. written by Ed Catmull. In the book, he talks about Pixar and how the original team have kept the Pixar name and movies great. He goes behind the movies to the people creating them and talks about the struggles they have and how the leaders have tried to hold the company together during major changes. In doing so, they have had to come up with some creative and new ways to keep the work from getting stale.

Though there are many great insights in the book, the one that has really stuck with me is Andrew Stanton's motto, "Fail faster." His thought behind it being that the faster you try new things, the faster you can fail and the faster you can learn from your failures.
I love that idea. We all have to fail at some point, and we will always have to fail again to move on. So why not just embrace the failures? Why should I be scared of failing? I'm still able to create, which is the main goal to begin with.

So in my 30 goals, I listed "Do 30 days of something." I am going a bit overboard with this one by deciding to do 100 (since there is a 100 days of happiness challenge, I wanted to do something similar), but wanted to really make it a habit out of failing and trying new things.

But, since I have "accomplished" 30 failures, here are the things I've learned:

- many fails might not be failures as much as frustrations or not living up to our own high expectations of ourselves
- every artist has a different style! I shouldn't be afraid to show my real self
- I only fail at what I don't try
- I'm not going to create good art everyday, so I shouldn't expect everything to be really good
- coming up with new things to do or new things to "fail at" can be rather hard
- a lot of initial failures come from failing to do anything to begin with
- many failures I think of, are not necessarily physical objects I can post on Instagram 
- I wanted to log my attempts and failures as a way to help me reflect and learn from these attempts

At the end of the day, I may not be happy with everything I've created, but at least I created! Sometimes that's really all it's about. Just learning how to start and make many fumbling failures.

So go on and fail as many times as you can! 

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