The path to success is paved with failed experiments
One of the many fallacies of the human mind is believing that successful people have always been successful. We do this because by the time someone gets promoted or wins an Oscar or a Pulitzer, they’ve usually built up a long track-record of success. Then it comes as a shock that a NYT Bestseller received over 500 rejections, or that Harrison Ford started off as an uncredited bellboy.
This is particularly true in the tech world, where this kind of thinking extends both into the past and into the future. So-and-so’s first startup was successful so they must have always been a brilliant mind (past) and anything else they do is bound to be successful too (future).
With actors, you can watch them learn and grow, so you can marvel at Christian Bale now while holding in your mind the kid from Newsies. But somehow this doesn’t translate automatically to giving ourselves grace, and allowing ourselves to believe that we have a long road ahead and that we may reach our peak, like Dame Maggie Smith, in our sixties or even our eighties. No, when it comes to ourselves, if we haven’t peaked by 30, we’re somehow doomed and incompetent.
At my tech day job, we’ve ingrained the value of an “experimentation culture.” Try stuff out. Measure its impact. Eric Reis, in Lean Startup, talks about the importance of speeding up the feedback loop that allows us to learn about the market quickly, without investing months or years in building a product that fails. The key to experimentation culture, though, is not being afraid to get information.
Even bad news.
And that’s where the trouble begins.
Because the human mind (forever our greatest enemy) does not like rejection or failure. The shame-rage spiral of disappointment (I can’t believe I didn’t get it! How dare they not recognize me? Maybe I just suck and should give up) is truly toxic and stressful, so our mind tries to protect us from it by refusing to seek out information that might start that spiral.
Feedback is a threat.
If you asked me, based on all my varied experiences, what’s the #1 thing that holds people back in their careers and dreams? It’s the fear of being given a bad grade. That one-star review, that failed promotion attempt, Jana Novotna’s famous mental collapse at Wimbledon, it all comes down to that. Your mind shoots you down before anyone else can.
So you either don’t bother trying or you self-sabotage, or if you’ve tried and failed a few times, you give up, internalizing the message: not good enough.
A few years after I graduated from college, I went back and had lunch with one of my former creative writing professors. She asked me why I hadn’t yet written a novel. I was in my early twenties, and the idea of being a novelist was ridiculous (at the time, YA hadn’t really taken off as a genre, never mind as an industry). I replied that I was waiting until I was good enough. Maybe I’d do an MFA, and write my “real” novel at 40.
She said, “You’ll write one novel at twenty-five. You’ll write another one at 40. They’ll be different. Doesn’t mean one of them is better than the other. Just because you’re young it doesn’t mean you have nothing to say.”
She had no way of knowing how prophetic her words would turn out to be. But here’s the kicker. The novel I wrote at twenty-five wasn’t an instant NYT Bestseller. And, rather than believe that it was a good novel and that I’d go on to write others that were just as good or better, I internalized that it was a failure. It took me a long time to feel I had another novel in me.
We are culturally trained to expect instant breakout success.
Real success might look different. It might look like trying ten things and understanding how they landed. For instance, I had heard that the best way to promote your book is via Amazon ads. For a long time, I assumed they were unnecessary. After all, my books should be successful on their own merit (breakout). I shouldn’t have to promote them. If I had to promote them, didn’t that mean they were failures? (Note the all-or-nothing fallacy in the success-failure binary).
I decided to try out Amazon ads, while setting guardrails on failure. Over two months, I ran various ad campaigns to see how they performed. In February, I spent ~$6 and had 7 people click on about 5,000 ad impressions. In March, for less than $4, I got 14 clicks out of over 16,000 ad impressions. Still no sales, but the throughput got better. Maybe success is just this: a long path paved with failed experiments.
Another area where I’ve been trying this approach out is with querying agents. A lot of writers try too early for publication and get shot down. Others wait too long, because they’re afraid of being shot down. So they sit and perfect their novel in isolation, never getting feedback on what is / isn’t working. I was in the latter category. Earlier this year, I decided that the first category was a better strategy to get information.
So I queried some agents. If they responded with a form email, my premise was not marketable. If they responded with some version of “I like it, but…” I’d get information from that crucial “but” about what needed to change in the first few pages of my submission. In the few cases where agents or publishers requested a full manuscript but then shot it down, I’d know it wasn’t my idea that wasn’t working but rather the execution.
Rather than steeling myself against rejections, I shifted to actively seeking them out. The faster people rejected me, the faster I’d learn how to pivot. And to build the resilience and fortitude to withstand all that rejection, I kept the positive things people I trusted (finicky readers and professional editors) had said about my draft novel pinned in open tabs. Any time I needed an emotional pick-me-up, I’d take a look at those tabs.
Here are my current stats:
Form rejections: 15
I like it, but…: 8
Rejections on a full manuscript: 4
These are very small numbers. Just like I learned a lot about my ad campaigns for $10, I learned a lot about my manuscript with < 30 rejections.
Success is out there. To quote those famous words by Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.