Failure is now cheaper...

...and that is excellent news.

The more I listen to creative people discuss their work, one common thread that emerges is that you have to do lots and lots of work before the quality of the work begins to approach the quality of your taste, i.e., a lot of the stuff you do at the beginning will not be so good, and you'll know it's not so good, and you have two options: you can stop working (as many people do), or you can push through and keep working, pushing each piece of work closer and closer to excellence, closing the quality/taste gap more and more. In an earlier post, Ira Glass discussed this at length.

(Personal moment #1: my father is a very bright and honest man with a quiver of aphorisms which he takes up when a teachable moment arrives. A favorite was:

A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

Saddish news #1: the gap will always be there-- all of us are working to shrinkshrinkshrink it as best we can.)

So, to get where you want to go, you're going to have to generate a certain amount of material that's not up to your own snuff. (Saddish news #2: for a while, most of what you generate will fall into this category. If you immediately begin pleasing yourself greatly, you'll want to investigate the possibility that a) you are gifted on the level of a Daniel Tammet or Willie Mosconi, or b) your means of self-evaluation are not sufficiently incisive.)

(Personal moment #2: my father spent (and continues to spend) most of his working time in finance. The fact that I knew what EBITDA* stood for when I was TWELVE YEARS OLD may have some impact on the following analysis of the situation.)

You should minimize the cost of this failure, because you're about to buy a lot of it. You're spending your time and energy, which are finite resources, to get this failure. Get it as cheap as you can.

Happy news: here are two helpful things that will radically lower the cost of your failure, and they're both within reach.

Aid to Cheap Failure #1: The Internet. The cheapest collaboration/
publication/research tool ever invented by human beings. Say you wrote an article. Want to publish it?

1a) Reproduce that article on paper many times over (hello Kinko's), mail it to as many appropriate magazines/journals/periodicals you can think of, wait around for a while, and receive tons of rejections. (high financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio) = pretty darn high.

1b) Register a domain on Blogger.com or similar service, start typing, tell all your friends and colleagues, and see what happens. (very low financial/personal costs) x (failure/success ratio [same as before]) = much much lower. I'm still buying about as much failure (I'm still not selling books at Borders), and it's still not much fun, but I can afford to keep buying it long enough for it to start paying off in terms of better-quality work. (I picked this option, as you can tell.)

The transaction cost works the same from the research side-- you can hope that the article you're looking for appears somewhere in a $6 magazine or $45 journal, or you can hope it's at your local library, or wait for inter-library loan-- or you can search for the topics that interest you online. Neither is perfect, but one is way cheaper.

Cory Doctorow talks about this at length in a lecture he gave at Cambridge. The whole thing is worth a read, but YouTube has a pertinent excerpt up:

Aid to Cheap Failure #2: Higher education (of whatever flavor: community college, junior college, university, grad school, etc.)

I don't know about you, but if I'm going to spend most of my beginning creative time failing, I'd really like to do it somewhere where I'm not also relying on my creative work to pay the rent. Not that higher education is necessarily inexpensive (I'm not done with my doctorate yet, so we can wax rhapsodic about college costs together sometime), but it provides you with an environment where you don't *need* to nail it the first time. It also provides you with a small army of people (aka faculty) who will give you information that will save you from having to learn some things by trial and error. TRIAL AND ERROR IS AN EFFECTIVE BUT PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE WAY TO LEARN.

College can't come close to teaching you everything you need to know. But it does allow you to work out the kinks/fall on your face/make your mistakes so that when failure becomes expensive, you'll need to buy only small amounts of it to get your success. I wonder if this could be expanded into...

A Theory on the Macroeconomics of Creativity

In the beginning phases of the learning process, large amounts of my time/energy/intelligence/resources are used to purchase large amounts of failure as cheaply as possible. My failure is then used to purchase creative success. Like any monetary system, large supplies of currency (here, failure) create inflationary pressures, i.e., rising prices. Hence, lots of failure in the equation means that the price of success per unit of failure is quite high, and I need to acquire and spend large amounts of failure to get a decent amount of success.

Later on (say, after graduating), I'm still pouring in large amounts of t/e/i/r, but I'm getting less failure for my efforts. This is because failure is more expensive and I can afford less of it-- if I fail now, instead of just being frustrated, I get frustrated AND lose money from low ticket sales AND renting the hall AND paying the musicians, say. But, because the supply of failure currency has tightened up, the price of success per unit failure has gone way down. Same t/e/i/r input with less failure and more success. This is good because a) I'm learning and improving, and b) who wants a lot of failure hanging around? I'm going to buy it all up ASAP so I can sell it all off as soon as I can. (Incidentally, this is also why starting new careers or new large projects in adulthood can be as scary as it is-- you're going back to purchasing large amounts of failure in your new venture at a point in life when failure is very expensive. Lots of adults make it cheaper by...you guessed it...going back to school.)

Throw yourself in the deep end. Go out and fail. Interrogate the failure. Go out and fail again. Get a hug when you need one. Go out and fail again. Keep doing work. Enjoy the success. Go out and fail. Stay warm.

And thanks, Dad.

*EBITDA = Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization