It’s Okay to Fail
Penguin October 16th, 2008
I’ve been really stressed out since coming back from LA. Part of it was because I had an essay due on Tuesday. I started working on it but didn’t make much headway.
Class came and it still wasn’t done. But before that, I decided that I was going to hand it in late. Wednesday came and gone and although I made a little more progress, I don’t even have what can be called a first draft.
Right before I typed this, I played a little Tetris DS before sleeping. CPU lvl 5 thoroughly kicked my butt. And that’s when I realized what was really stressing me out. I was afraid to fail.
Not in the grade sense of the word, but fail myself. I set myself up to be amazing. I have to get the A. I have to try really hard. And in that, I lost sight of everything and stressed myself out. I had frozen in panic.
So instead of moving forward and just doing it, I ended up doing nothing.
This is the same lesson we sometimes have to learn as filmmakers or artists. We’re so caught up in needing our work to be perfect, in being amazing, that we set ourselves up to fail by not meeting those expectations. And we’ve been trained for 18+ years of our lives that it’s NOT okay to fail. When in reality, it is.
It’s okay to fail.
I look back at some of the stuff I put out and I know it’s not the best. But there was something authentic about it. Instead of just talking about doing something, I did it. And that’s a success.
Doing nothing is the failure.
Shoot that short film, write that book, draw what you enjoy, do something, anything! Because not doing anything would be a tragedy.
Now I can sleep.
-Penguin
Related posts
