The Art of Failing: How Mistakes Set Up Your Perfect Launchpad for Creative Growth

Allen C. Paul:  I'm going to say two words that might make you just want to turn off this podcast. You failed. Now, how does that make you feel if you immediately said, hey, hey, you don't know me. Just back off. You don't know what I, , do or whether I failed. I don't know how you can come out with that. Maybe your reaction says something about the way you view failure. Maybe failure is something we should discuss, especially since failure might be your biggest friend. I'm going to explain that and help you out with this concept in this episode of, , the God and Gig Show. Give me just a moment to welcome those of you who are new to our channel and then we'll get right into this important discussion. Hello. Welcome to our show. Thank you so much for making this podcast a part of, , your creative day. If you're new to our show, thank you for joining us. My name is Alan C. Paul. I'm a creative coach, musician, and author. And this is where we help you to transform your creative life from the inside out by solving your temporary creative problems with timeless spiritual principles. Now, we're here with our podcast here at YouTube channel and everywhere on all podcast networks. I hope you'll subscribe follow us, because if you are a content creator, musician, artist, anyone inside the arts and entertainment space, and even combine ministry with that, but you don't necessarily work inside a church. You simply have high values and high character, and you want to continue to become that creative that can walk into any space with confidence. That's what we help you do here. Now, let me get right into today's topic, because if you're listening and watching while this particular thing is coming out, it's around the time of the NBA playoffs, and a certain NBA star got into a little bit of hot water when his team failed to win a championship or actually get out of the first round. And they asked him, what's this season of failure? And he got a little bit annoyed with that question, and he gave a long answer, which some people are saying was amazing and some people are saying was kind of excuse filled. And basically his point was that there's no failure when you have been trying for a long time to do something and you learn from every mistake and you learn from every time you don't make it. And so there's no real failure. He said, no failure in sports. And now I'm wondering, in creative life, would we say that? Would you say there's no failure in creativity, there's no failure in creative industries, there's no failure in art? I don't know. This is the question I love to pose to you, and it's practical and it's also spiritual. The first thing I'd like to say is I like to look at this first from a spiritual standpoint because it takes me right back to someone who you think would never fail, and that would be Jesus. Now, as a Christian, I believe Jesus never sinned. But I would also say that Jesus did have to deal with failure, because the Bible does say he was tempted in always as we are. He was a human being. So maybe he didn't ever fail in a spiritual sense. But I can imagine that if he's trying to lift the box someplace and he didn't lift it or couldn't lift it, or fail to get somewhere in time or something, that there could be failure in a human sense that he dealt with. But he did deal with the failures of people around him. His disciples failed him. The people around him failed to do what he asked them to do. They failed to have faith. So he was faced with failure all the time. So to say that we shouldn't understand failure is to say that we don't know that even the Son of God didn't understand failure, which is false. He knew what failure was all about, and he knew that we would fail because we weren't perfect. So now let's take it to the creative side. Where have we forgotten the power of failure? Well, first I'd say it's probably in the fact that we don't like to admit as creatives and musicians and artists, we forget that failure is a part of our continual growth and development. Nobody picked up an instrument the very first time and played every single note perfectly. No one picked up an art brush or a computer program or a pen and made no mistakes. Mistakes are part of the creative process. As a matter of fact, I think it's Scott Adams that said, creativity is knowing which mistakes to keep. And so we have to learn that failure is a part of our creative process. But then we have to decide where do we embrace that failure and how do we use it to our advantage since it's going to happen. There's a great book by M. John Maxwell. I actually have it right here. If you're watching on YouTube. It's called failing forward. Right here. It's one of my favorite books. I've had it on my bookshelf forever. And one of the things that John Maxwell says we need to redefine failure, and I don't mean redefine failure in terms of ignore the word. I think one of the things that got a little lost, , in translation with this whole discussion about failure is the idea that the word is a bad word, that failure is a bad word, that we should never say it. I don't believe personally, that failure is a bad word. I think that it's great to say, yes, this was a failure. This particular thing did not achieve the results. This particular thing did not come up to standards. Why? Because it proves we have standards. It proves that there is something that we're trying to reach for I believe it's okay to be a black and white, a no gray in the middle. Either it worked or it didn't work. What that allows us to do is to now objectively look at what we can do to improve. And if we ignore or try to dismiss failure as just a process, which of course it is, but we don't need to dumb it down to the point that we ignore that something can be a failure. Now the question is, how do we respond to that? And in this book, Failing Forward, there are two points I would love to bring out. One is to ignore this whole idea that you are a failure because you have failed. John Maxwell says it remove the you from failure. And what that really means for us is not to take it personally. If I failed at something, that's the fact it's been a failure. Not I am a failure, but that action, that process, that song, that particular thing failed to achieve its results, which is fine. It doesn't mean that I am a failure. And I think one of the biggest issues is when we hear that word you failed, we think we are or you are or I am a failure. Which is not the statement. The statement is about an issue or fact or a song or a piece of art or whatever. If it failed to achieve what you wanted to achieve, it's okay. It is not a personal declaration of your identity. And so one of the key things that I believe Maxwell is saying in the book and , I'm saying to you is try to dismiss your ego and your feelings from a failure. It is simply the fact of what happened. Now, can you feel bad about it? Do you want to improve it? Yes. That's okay. And it can motivate you, but it should not become part of your identity and it definitely shouldn't become something that you say about yourself. Now, the second thing I'd like to talk about failure is the second half, which is what do you do next? The response to failure is, I think, more important than necessarily the fact that we fail at something, the fact that something didn't work. So when we respond, we have to look at it objectively again, say what does this make possible? What is now the opportunity that this failure provides for me? It provides an opportunity to learn. It provides an opportunity to look at things. It provides new perspective. It provides a lot of things that you may not realize that failure makes obvious and , makes open to you. That would not have happened had you had a perfect track record and never had the failure. As a matter of fact, failure proves that you're pushing past your comfort zone if you are lifting weights and you never push to the point of failure, that you'll never know where you might have been able to succeed, because you never reach that point. That says here is your limit right now. And here's where you can work at improving. So creatively. You got to push yourselves to places of failure to even find out what you're capable of. Failure is your mark of where you can go next. Failure is your point of origin to the next season of your creative life. So if you never find failure as kind of like a friend and see that failing forward is a thing, again, redefining it not simply as it's a bad thing about me, but more about it's a place that I'm at right now where I can see where to move on from here. That is what we need to do with failure as creatives, and especially as faith focused creatives who want to see what God is doing on our life. Because again, if God is acquainted with failure and he's not scared of it and he realizes that we're fallible and that we'll make mistakes, then he's perfectly okay with us using failure as an opportunity to grow. As a matter of fact, I think that is one of the main reasons that our faith allows us to see failure as a place to grow. Because the Bible says itself, when we are weak, that's when he's strong. When we acknowledge that we are failing, that is when he steps in and says, here, let me help you. So as a creative, as a Christian, as a person that wants to grow, failure is your friend. And you can, like the book says, fail forward. So let's not dismiss the word be scared of the word, but let's make sure we use the word correctly so that it benefits us and we can see ourselves succeeding more and more as we apply the lessons that failure brings and make sure we keep the right perspective. Well, my friend, that's our Creative Checkup episode for today. I hope you'll continue to follow us. Make sure you follow us on all social subscribe to the channel that you're using to listen or watch this right now. And I really hope that you'll continue to do that because there's so many episodes and interviews that we do consistently that help you level up in your faith, in your creative life, in your career, in your family, in your relationships. 360 is what we aspire to with our name of our M membership. If you want to check out that membership, by the way, it's at Gotonggicks.com, um, Gold actuallygold program Gottagig.com Gold. Go there and you can find out our free trial for our 360 program, 360 Gold. And it's where everyone in that program is leveling up in every area of their creative life. But I want you to do that no matter what. So stay connected with us, and I would love to see you continue to be a part of our community until next time, continue to become the creative that you were created to be. God bless and I'll see you next episode.

Speaker B: Thanks for joining us here at the God and Gigs show. Please leave us a review on itunes like our Facebook page or visit godandgigs.com and tell us what you thought of this show. We'll be back soon. In the meantime, go create something amazing.

Speaker A: M.