8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: failing lessons

Chapter List

  • Advice Less

    You may have found this blog project and be thinking that I’ve made a terrible mistake.

    There’s not really much advice here, you might be thinking.

    You’re not wrong, but you’re not right.

    This was never intended to be a manual about being a creative person. No. Not at all. It was meant to be a collection of thoughts on the accidental nature of creativity. I have no solid advice. I have no lists of skills to check off on your way towards success.  I have no morals or lessons or cautionary tales with polished insights at the end.

    This is a fumbling, imperfect exercise in abstraction. It is an daily exercise in being lost on a path that is as much about the journey as it is about a destination. Imperfection is the goal.

    You want a lesson?

    Fail more. Because it means you tried something and maybe learned.

    Embrace different. Because it might be the only way to stand out in a crowd.

    Close your eyes and ignore all the other advice. Because copying is what machines do and the humanity of creativity is something that might not be teachable so much as felt, gleaned, experienced, caught, or whatever.

    You’re not wrong. There isn’t much advice here, just a few notes from the last guy to wander this path and never really find his way out.

  • Pinch Poster

    This is not the post I had intended to drop here today.

    I’ve been keeping about a week and a half ahead of my schedule these days, writing posts, getting them queued up on the back end of the blog, giving myself both breathing room and time to go back over and revise stuff I’ve written before it goes live.

    And about two weeks ago I started a whole new series. It was going to be about a bunch of big projects I was going to tackle, and write big multi-part articles about.

    I wrote an introduction post that was supposed to go out instead of this post.

    It fumbled and flopped before it even launched. I was struggling getting the actual project done in the middle of writing all about how great it was going. [Slowly pulls back curtain and…]

    In this case, I realized that committing to the time to do the project itself was just out of the realm of reasonability as summer arrives and things get busier around our house. 

    I accept failure as a natural part of working on big ideas. Not everything is going to take and sometimes—like this past week—you’re going to find that you’ve bit off a bit more than you can chew on. Take the L and move on.