A few months back, I was feeling pretty rotten. I was frustrated
with the lack of interest in my novel, worried that I had chosen the
wrong path when I decided to focus on being a writer, and starting to
wonder if I had what I takes to be successful in the publishing
industry. I spent three years of my life working on something that
perhaps no one would ever read, and I was spending a lot of time asking
myself what the point of all that hard work had been.
- Invest in a duster so at least your book appears to be getting some interest.
Then
I heard a story on "To The Best of Our Knowledge" (which is an
excellent radio show/podcast from Wisconsin Public Radio), and it put
all my frustrations into perspective. The story was an interview with
psychologist Carl Dweck, who had recently published a book called
"Mindset: The New Psychology of Success." You can listen to the story
itself
here, if you're interested.
- Image of the book in question, folks.
The
gist of Dweck's argument is that people respond to failure in two
different ways: some people fall apart when they fail and some people
learn from their failures. To the people who fall apart, success and
failure are measures of worth: failure means they are not intelligent,
not talented, and that they never will be. They avoid challenges for
the fear of being proven to be unworthy (or incapable) of success. But
the people who learn from their failures seem to look at them as
obstacles they have overcome, as lessons they have learned. These
people seem to thrive, almost, on failure, to become energized by it.
They understand that abilities, talents, and intelligence are not
attributes a person is born with, but attributes that develop over time
and with practice. Talent is less like the bones in your arm, which are
more or less always going to be the same (nutrition aside) and more
like the muscles, which get bigger and stronger the more they are used.
- Better start working on those brain muscles.
In
some ways, this argument fits quite nicely with my Dorothy Parker
apply-the-ass-to-the-chair philosophy; you will only ever get there if
you work hard to get there. But what happens if you work hard and you
don't get there? It feels sometimes like a hamster on a wheel -- the
hamster might think it's going somewhere, but really it's just running
in place. Dweck argues that we need to look at our failures as a chance
to learn something about what we're going for. Why didn't it work?
What did we learn from the process?
We spend too much time
focusing on where we want to end up (in my case, well-respected and
widely-read novelist) and not enough time thinking about the process of
getting there. Even when we look at people we admire, we don't see the
younger version of those people who stumbled along the way to their
success. We don't look at their struggles, their failures, and say,
"Look how persistent they were! Look how hard they worked!" We say,
"That person is a genius." Or worse, "That person was destined for
greatness."
- Isn't brilliance fun?
Nobody
is destined for greatness. Some people get very, very lucky, but most
people who wind up great bust their asses to get there. Their work,
their contributions to our society, aren't just some magical extension
of their natural genius, but the result of years and years of
passionate, bone-grinding, sweat-flooded hard work. And sure, some
people are naturally smarter and more talented than others. But as a
writing teacher I once had said, "If you give me a student with natural
talent and a student who works hard and ask me which will be a
best-seller, I'd bet on the hard worker every time."
The fact that
so many people envision their heroes as geniuses who burst, fully
developed from the skulls of gods, makes me really value writers who
talk about their failures. I love to hear stories about now-successful
writers who struggled in their formative years, not because I'm a
glutton for pain (my love of horror films notwithstanding), but because
it makes me feel like the success that I want for myself is not so out
of reach. Stephen King famously wrote about his collection of rejection
slips, thousands of them, from the time that he was a child until he
published "Carrie." And most writers have heard, at this point, about
Kathryn Stockett's 60 rejections for "The Help." The fact that these
writers learned from their rejections, that they kept evolving and
persisting even when everybody around them told them to give up is
inspiring.
- "I may have been born fully formed, but my brain wasn't."
I
can look at my novel and say, yes, I hope it does better, but I can
also learn from the things that I have done wrong. I have lots of
feedback from all those agents who rejected my work, and if I stop
looking at those rejections as just letters that spell N-O, and start
looking at them as tools for learning the business, I have already
gained something. And the years I spent tripping over words and trying
to find the rhythm required for writing a novel taught me what kinds of
things I need to do to motivate myself to write, what kind systematic
approach I should take to writing a piece of work that long, and how to
approach agents when I'm ready to publish -- those years were prime
learning years!
In the end, who knows where my writing will end
up? But I can't know that until the end comes. I have years and years
and years to go, and right now the years ahead are for busting ass and
learning how to get back up. And that's okay by me.
I totally love this post! I have noticed a number of people perhaps fail once and then avoid putting themselves out there again, to avoid failing again. Taking an easy route and missing their potential. You have to learn, and keep trying. That's what life is all about. Never giving up and pursuing what you love, all the while learning.
ReplyDeleteIt is the same in business. Most very successful business men have noted how many times they failed before they succeed. How many things they'd tried to start, before it really came together.
Don't get give up! Keep learning :)
I think of scientific studies when I consider learning from failure. No study or experiment ends exactly how the scientist wants the first time -- the whole point of it is to test what works and what doesn't, so failure is a necessary part of finding the right answer or answers. I find it interesting that people struggle so much with failure when all of our greatest discoveries are born on the back of profound and recurring failure.
ReplyDelete