🧙 Inneresting #152 - It's not a failure—it's a side quest
🧙 Inneresting #152 - It's not a failure—it's a side quest
If at first you don't succeed, learn from it.
Everywhere you look, people work to put their best selves forward. But those snapshots of life rarely tell the whole story. Bridget Webber looks at the idea that we’re conditioned to hide our mistakes and failures, which prevents us from getting the encouragement we need to push through adversity:
As infants, we had to learn to walk. We fell repeatedly, but we got up and tried again anyway. Of course, it took an age to stride the way adults do. But we didn’t care who watched or judged us.
If we had, we would have seen our parents wildly motivating us with claps, smiley faces, and praise wrapped in squeaky voices to encourage us.
These days when we screw rip, few people want to cheer us on. Partly because we don’t let them see us at our worst and partly because we love our comfort zones.
Dr. Samuel West curates The Museum of Failure, an exhibition showcasing inventions that failed to work as promised or just didn’t capture the popular imagination. The goal: To counter the impulse to push aside failures instead of learning from them. The collection asks people to be more open with their failures instead of fearing judgement.
Along those same lines, Austin Kleon highlights an archival interview with David Sylvester, who talks about the pressure artists feel to prepare their work for critical and public reaction. Sylvester argues that fear of failure hurts artists because the expectation is that whatever new work they show needs to be as good or better as everything else, and that artists must be given a little grace to make mistakes so they can grow.
That’s a crucial part of Derek Sivers’s lecture “Why You Need to Fail.” From a time lapse of Picasso painting over and editing a work in progress to a story about a music professor’s exercises to force Sivers to reinterpret an original song, the underlying message comes through: “There’s no such thing as failure if everything is an experiment.”
Moving on to some examples: Alvin Chang crafts an interactive story on the years it took to recreate his grandmother’s kimchi recipe. And Mark Leiren-Young gives a behind the scenes look at the work that went into the never shot television adaptation of Moon Knight from 2006, sharing the excitement of working on the project itself, even though it never became a reality.
Everybody fails. If you fail and stop, that’s the end of the journey. But by moving on, those dead ends can just be detours—chances to gain experience, level up, and better prepare for your next quest.
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Go on your own side quest
It’s dangerous to sprint alone. Try this!
What’s a Write Sprint?
John wrote up an explanation, but here’s the short version: Set a timer for 60 minutes, close down all distractions, and do nothing but write until that timer goes off.
Shout out to last week’s Sprinters John Harvey and Aimee Link!
WGA Strike Reading
An interesting take from John Rogers. Let’s dig in a little further.
Farnham Street offers a concise version of Chesterton’s Fence: Do not remove a fence unless you know why it was put up in the first place. People shouldn’t assume that because they don’t understand why something exists, that doesn’t mean it’s pointless or useless. The article uses an example from Steve Blank written in 2009, citing a trend in startups:
They grow to the point where it makes sense to hire a Chief Financial Officer. Eager to make an immediate difference, the new CFO starts looking for ways to cut costs so they can point to how they’re saving the company money. They take a look at the free snacks and sodas offered to employees and calculate how much they cost per year—perhaps a few thousand dollars. It seems like a waste of money, so they decide to do away with free sodas or start charging a few cents for them. After all, they’re paying people enough. They can buy their own sodas.
Blank writes that, in his experience, the outcome is always the same. The original employees who helped the company grow initially notice the change and realize things are not how they were before. Of course they can afford to buy their own sodas. But suddenly having to is just an unmissable sign that the company’s culture is changing, which can be enough to prompt the most talented people to jump ship. Attempting to save a relatively small amount of money ends up costing far more in employee turnover. The new CFO didn’t consider why that fence was up in the first place.
For an example of the failure to heed Chesterton’s warning in the current actions of the AMPTP, look no further than the practices in television of shifting to mini-rooms and not paying writers to work on set. From Boris Kit and Lesley Goldberg in The Hollywood Reporter:
One of the other central issues at stake in the negotiations is the proliferation of so-called “mini rooms” that feature a handful of writers breaking stories before a formal series order, which is not always a guarantee. The guild is looking for guarantees of 10 straight weeks of work that include sending writers to set. The latter used to be a no-brainer for broadcast, but has fallen out of favor with studios and streamers given the added costs of getting writers to set. Some showrunners, like former WGA negotiating committee member Shawn Ryan (Netflix’s The Night Agent), have successfully requested that streamers send writers to set as they look to help train the next generation.
Why does it matter to send writers to set and to production meetings? Take a look at this instructional document written by Eliza Clark, the showrunner for Y: The Last Man detailing best practices for writers on set.
Not only does it offer clear explanations of what a writer will see in concept meetings, location scouting, and filming scenes, but it breaks down why it’s important to learn to communicate with various production departments. Different teams have different needs when turning a script into an actionable set of props, locations, and tasks.
Thinking about all the steps involved in Clark’s instructions to writers, honing these skills trains people to become the next generation of show runners. Staffing fewer writers for less time and reducing the complex job of being the writer on set to an unpaid “internship” position means a smaller pool of writers with the skills and experience to run their own shows in the future.
Summed up by Eric Thurm for GQ:
You don’t get The Sopranos without David Chase’s years on Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Rockford Files, and Northern Exposure. Squeezing production tighter and reducing opportunities for advancement means that, eventually, there will be fewer and fewer people able to actually make the media the studios need.
Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link Jack Cheng draws a line between spaces created to show care and those designed to show cleverness. It’s an idea that the places we live and work in can give you back energy through caring for them, or drain your energy in maintaining an unsustainable aesthetic.
Other Inneresting Things
David McCandless and James Key visualize the most frequently contested wikipedia entries, including the source of the conflict. For example, there were 2088 edits disputing whether or not Star Wars Episode III should be considered the “preceding film” to Star Wars Episode IV since the prequel came out 30 years later.
TIL that slug line comes from the name for a single line of cast type from early typesetting machines:
Reading the room
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And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team.
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