May
8
The Museum of Failure
May 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Thank you to my friend Zander for mentioning his desire to one day open a Museum of Failure. It got me thinking. Success is delicious, but consider this: Success is a fairy tale. The universe is ever-changing. The only thing we can really rely on is that everything that exists at this very moment, our emotional state, our perception of our accomplishments, our awesome book reviews, our clean kitchen, will change. So then, how should we begin to view failing and succeeding as a continuum rather than a case of either/or? Once we are able to see it this way, I think half the battle of writers block, for example, would be solved. So much inaction is due to failure being so damn frightening, when really our greatest successes are hues in failure’s rainbow.
In her essay “Fail Better”, writer Zadie Smith discusses why the dream of a perfect novel drives writers crazy…
Zadie Smith on literature’s legacy of honourable failure
1. The tale of Clive
I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission: he wants to write the perfect novel. Clive has a lot going for him: he’s intelligent and well read; he’s made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong; he has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory – those elegant blueprints for novels not yet built – and is now ready to build his own unparalleled house of words. Maybe Clive even teaches novels, takes them apart and puts them back together. If writing is a craft, he has all the skills, every tool. Clive is ready. He clears out the spare room in his flat, invests in an ergonomic chair, and sits down in front of the blank possibility of the Microsoft Word program. Hovering above his desktop he sees the perfect outline of his platonic novel – all he need do is drag it from the ether into the real. He’s excited. He begins… [the rest, here]
Here’s a great video on failure from the TED talks of 2009 – Brian Cox: What went wrong (and what’s next) at the Large Hadron Collider