A friend of mine posted a link to this video on their Twitter feed this morning and it highlights one of the most important lessons anyone can learn in life – whether it be filmmakers, entrepreneurs, sportsmen or cake-bakers:
The need to fail to succeed is one of the most overlooked elements of any career. Many a great man, woman or muppet has said that they have learned more from their failures than they have from their successes, mostly because failing forces you to sit down and work out what went wrong in order to be able to avoid making the same mistakes twice.
Being free to fail is invaluable to any artist when starting out, but if you want to increase your success rate quicker you will need to learn to fully analyse the things you do right and not just pick apart the things that go wrong.
By taking apart your successful endeavours with the same rigour as you study your errors, you can help yourself learn in a positive way. Don’t get me wrong, you will still fail – we all will – but learning analysis is the key to pushing yourself, your work and your career forward.