I have not failed, not once. I’ve discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.* — Thomas Edison
The above quote is often attributed to Thomas Edison regarding the advancements he was making with the lightbulb. I put an asterisk by it because it’s unclear the exact wording he used, or even if he said something along these lines at all, but my mom would tell me this from time to time whenever I felt discouraged by failure, so there you go.
Failure has always been a tough one for me – that and rejection (which I guess is a type of failure), I loath them both. Especially if I go hard at something or I really want something, to not get it is almost an unbearable disappointment. It takes me forever to recover, forever to want to venture out and try again.
Yet the older I get, I’m realizing that I ain’t got time for all that. But in actuality, it really doesn’t matter how old you are – you could be 18 or 80, nobody got time for that.
Failure is gonna happen – I don’t care how smart you are, how cute you are, how capable you are, who you know and so on. Failure is gonna happen, so you might as well do it quickly.
Now that doesn’t mean you approach things hastily, or you do a half-assed job at something – you want to do your best. Just don’t procrastinate for fear that you aren’t good enough. And if you happen to fail at whatever you took a chance on, get over it quickly as well. Reevaluate and try again, or try something else.
Recently, I had an opportunity to put this advice into practice myself. Remember that scriptwriting contest I was telling you about in my last post? Well, I never entered it. Turns out you had to pay for a membership in order to enter the contest – just a little minor detail I seemed to have overlooked.
I don’t know, there’s something about paying to enter a contest that just doesn’t sit well with me. Like, I don’t pay to submit a job application, and I wasn’t about to pay for this. It was only $30, but still. That’s $30 I could do something else with. I’ve paid to enter a contest once before – I think it was like $20 – and immediately regretted it. It was a short story contest, and by the way, I never heard from them again.
The funny thing is, after reading the submission agreement, which outlined the control they would have over anything I submitted to them, I was having second thoughts even before I knew about the $30 fee. Then I saw there was a charge, and I was super leery. Now I know I just said in the paragraph above that I wasn’t about to pay to enter the contest, and while deep down that’s truly how I felt, on the surface, I was still questioning. I mean, long shot or not, I don’t know anybody in this business, I have no idea how to break in by any other means. When you think about it that way, $30 is a small price to pay to potentially embark upon a movie career.
Conflicted as I was, I continued to explore the contest’s website. I perused the FAQs and learned that you had to upload your script by January 6th, even though the contest rules say January 15th.
What the contest webpage didn’t make clear is that essentially to participate in this contest you had to become a member of this organization, and part of being a member is uploading scripts to their site. Once you are a member and you already have scripts uploaded to the site, you had until January 15th to submit to this contest. However, if you were not already a member and you didn’t have a script on the site, you had to have uploaded a script by January 6th so that the script was active on the site for at least a week by the time you submitted the script on January 15th.
So on January 14th, when I was not a member, and was trying to decide if I should spend my $30 and submit my script, the decision was already made for me – it was too late. I discovered yet another way, I would not be starting my movie career.
And the funny thing is (and I realize I use that expression a lot, but hey, what can I say, it’s fitting) even though I had no idea how I was going to “break into” the movie business outside of this contest – still don’t – getting this news was surprisingly quite a relief.
That’s a totally different attitude towards failing than I had three years ago, the last time I submitted a movie script to a contest and didn’t get it (though this time I technically didn’t submit a script). Once I realized I didn’t get it – and I say realized, because I wasn’t formally contacted. The rules stated that if you don’t hear from them by January 31, you didn’t get it. So when January 31st rolled around and I didn’t hear from them, I was devastated.
I was like woe is me, and what am I gonna do now – yeah, the works. You see it took me three years to even submit to a contest again, don’t you? But this time, I was just like, okay – I’m okay with that. That just wasn’t for me.
For the longest time I thought winning meant never losing. That a winner is somebody who wins most of the time if not all of the time. And even when I realized that wasn’t true, it’s still hard to get out of that mode of thinking.
Yet, I see an exit sign up ahead…
I realize now that no matter who you are, failing is inevitable. I have a lot more failing to do, so I might as well do it quickly, get it over with, hop to it, let it make way for my wins.
Besides, there’s more than one way to win. I mean there are conventional ways that we all know, recognize, and desire, like getting accepted into a top school, getting your dream job, getting promoted, getting awards and the like. And granted, those are sho nuff wins.
But there are also other wins, like helping others, cultivating your best self, being resilient, having someone to love and someone who loves you, your relationship with God. Though we tend to downplay the significance of these things, without them, life would really be fucked up. Even the more conventional wins are made better when you have these things.
So I say go on, take the chance, take the L, fail quickly, win again.
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