Befriend Failure
Stephen McCranie
Befriend Failure (Credit: doodlealley.com)
My goal is to make good ideas easy to access, understand, and share. To this end, I create comics with heartfelt stories that are appropriate for all ages. I also try to facilitate the spread of useful ideas by drawing short comic essays about concepts and principles that have been beneficial to me. ~ Stephen McCranie
Delve into this always scary but always critical tenet for living a creative life:
The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.
This, McCranie believes, is the main difference between the beginner and the master.
It rings true for me, especially as I edge toward the exhilarating but risky launch of Wanderlust, the first in a series of short format memoirs. I’ve been writing and revising these chronicles for four years during which time they’ve evolved from a single-but-sprawling Year in Provence
It’s a scary/thrilling time. A time for confidence. And humility. A time to take a chance. To silence the critic within and risk failure. Come what may.
For the writer at least, and perhaps also for the reader, it is better to have tried and failed to achieve perfection than never to have tried at all. ~ Aldous Huxley (Preface – Collected Essays)
Befriend Failure (Credit: doodlealley.com)
This cartoon was sent to me recently by a close friend. The cartooning – the “doodling” – would appeal to me, not the message, not the befriend failure theme. This is what my friend said. And perhaps she meant it. Probably she meant it.
And I loved the cartooning. I’ve poured over many of McCranie’s clever, creative reflections on universal, often philosophical truths. But I’ve returned to this one cartoon, “Be Friends with Failure“, again and again. Shoot for success, but befriend failure.
Befriend failure? What sort of asinine advice is that?!?! How about gun for success, shoot for the moon, kick some @$$?
Yes, yes, yes. But befriend failure!
Hasta la vista, critic!
Related articles
- Fun Gets Stuff Done (neatorama.com)
- When Your Inner Critic Befriends the Naysayers (inkspeare.me)
- Making “Fast Art” (pekoeblaze.wordpress.com)
