Failing Like a Scientist
“Oh, I guess that didn’t work… On to the next one!”
A hard truth I’ve recently understood about creating things is that no one has an obligation to like what you’ve made (much to my dismay).
The hours you pour into creating something aren’t always equal to the amount of praise you’ll receive after sharing it. (Jonathan Larson, prior to becoming the playwright of Rent, once spent around 7 years writing a musical that no producer ended up wanting to produce).
Tragic, isn’t it? All those hours spent excitedly creating something, just for the crowd to go mild. It seems unfair… until you realize that you don’t even like everything you’ve read or watched. (Cats, anyone?)
So it means that everything we make is really just a test. Experiments. We’re only ever making things people might like, not will like. There’s no guarantee.
The second we believe people will 100% like what we’ve made, we enter in Ego Land: a place where the mirrors are large but the hats are too small.
Sure, we can learn the guiding principles of what makes good work good work. They tell us how to structure our sentences, how to write an effective outline and tell an impactful story. But at the end of the day, there is only so much within our own control. These are all guesses. Sharing it with others is more like checking to see if our guesses were right.
It’s about being curious, instead of totally expecting a good outcome. In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman summarizes it well:
Curiosity is a stance well suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others because it can be satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or dislike — whereas the stance of demanding a certain result is frustrated each time things fail to go your way
It isn’t up to us to decide if the work we made was good or not. But that’s okay. (Heck, I’m not even sure if this article will be meaningful to you; I’m spitballing with you here).
Like curious scientists, we can learn from our experiments — the articles we write and the things we create. We observe how people react, scribble notes, then create something even better.
This article was originally posted on The Freyncis Newsletter on February 7, 2022. Subscribe to receive my latest posts!
