FailureThere are a few different types of failure:Low-level; these are the daily upsets and letdowns.Mid-level; they sting for like a week or a month.High-level; getting fired, getting divorced, these are life changing and really can be cause for a lot of introspection.Let’s start with a good quote, that’s how all good podcasts start, right?“People who succeed are people who failed but they keep going anyway.”Examples:Mohammad Ali. He lost his first fight and then, after the fight, was claiming that he would be the heavyweight champion of the world.Michael Jordan, didn’t make his 10th grade basketball team. This failure is the impetus of his success. This is what lit his inner fire.Babe Ruth, he had the home run record and the strike out record at the same time. He went for it everytime, it was all or nothing. Babe Ruth was so confident that he would point over the fence to say he was about to hit a homerun before going to bat.Low-Level FailuresWhen Lee started art school he came to it really without any experience drawing or painting. The first 3 or 4 terms were kind of rough. Every day Lee would sulk into class and he would have done his best on his paintings and then would look at what everyone else had done and he knew that he wasn’t at their level yet. It was a daily failure, for the first couple of terms. It was tough and he really struggled with it; it was quite disheartening. He came up with a way to get through it:He was going to do 100 paintings and the wouldn’t start being judgmental of his work until he hit 100 paintings. He would keep tick marks on a sheet until he got to 100 and by the time he got there he was way better and more confident. By 100 paintings Lee was starting to find his stride and get pretty good, at that point at least it wasn’t daily failure.One problem we have is that we look at failures as failures. We have also been conditioned to not look at trying and failing as a learning and forward moving experience. Everything in school is all about moving up, what grades did you get? Were you right or wrong? We’ve been conditioned to not use trial and error for learning. In school we don’t get a good grade for trying and failing. All the results we see with report cards are all about moving up. That conditions us in a bad way for being artists. That model is good for math, it’s either right or wrong, but with a painting there is not just a right or wrong way, sometimes you have to wipe the paint off and redo the painting but that failure was apart of the successful journey.Will once had a student and they wouldn’t try anything with paint and were so afraid to make a bad mark, they were paralyzed. Will thinks that this was because they weren’t ever rewarded for trying and failing.Be 100 Percent ResponsibleParticipation awards, now in youth sports there are always participation rewards, but kids know it is a game and there are actually winners. They know who won and who lost.There is another way to categorize failures:Caused by you, and your choicesCaused by others, and their choicesCaused by external forces.You can’t always control the outcome of the failure however, your reaction to failure is up to you.Typically Jake’s goal, regardless of what caused the failure, he tries to take as much responsibility as possible for what happened, or for fixing the situation moving forward. Hopefully that’s the lesson from any sort of failure, you’ve learned something, if it didn’t work you can check it off your list, okay this didn’t work, and then you can keep moving forward.No matter what happened you can check it off your box, whether or not you caused the failure. You don’t have to be a victim, you can choose learn, and then move forward.Test Your HypothesesArt and life really is a lifelong learning process both on the micro and macro level. You’re always testing your hypotheses. You can always be learning. “I tested those theories and they didn’t work and so I am going to change the process, or change…”That’s how Lee learned watercolors. Initially in almost every painting he would fail. Watercolors are really difficult to master. Lee would constantly fail in every painting and would get frustrated because he had to buy these big sheets of expensive paper. He decided that he would start painting with the mindset that each painting was a test. And then that shift in thinking really helped him, instead of “I wrecked that painting and wasted that piece of paper”, it was, “okay, next time I need to put more water down.” he moved from frustration to a growth mindset.Rocket scientists almost celebrate when a rocket explodes. If the launch is successful sometimes they don’t know if they just got lucky. However, when it fails they get all of this data to learn from to solve the problem and then when the next launch is successful, they know that they were able to solve the problem.Jake feels the same way and if something takes off he is a little uneasy wondering if he just got lucky or if it was really good.Will was an early adopter of E books on Amazon and they his did really well and so he assumed that if he made interactive ebooks for the iPad they would see similar success and basically they totally failed, because people don’t buy iPad apps.Failing ForwardFailing ForwardThe subtitle of the book is: turning stepping stones into success.If you want to be a boxer you have to take hits.Your failures can motivate you and give you energy to persevere.Will would get upset when, in college, he’d show work to his wife and she wouldn’t like it, and he’d get frustrated that he couldn’t even impress his wife let alone others. So he would analyze his work and then used that frustration to keep working and get better.David Hohn, his wife was a graphic designer for Nike so he had a high bar to hit when he went home and showed her his work.Lee’s wife, Lisa, always has critique on his characters.Jake’s wife, Alison, always is straight up honest with Jake. Jake has to recognize that his target audience often isn’t his wife. But when it is something she likes she loves it and asks him why he doesn’t do more work like that.Jake’s mom would always give him a good ego boost, but not really any helpful critique.Sometimes your closest family will be your biggest fans or your biggest critics.Lee’s mom on the other hand would give him brutally honest critique. He never really drew, but it was raining outside and he decided to draw a picture of his great dane, he showed it to his mom and she said, “He looks deranged!”Will would always get critiqued that his drawings of children always looked too old.He was frustrated because he didn’t know how to fix it.He was putting the eyes in the adult places, and then he would add extra lines that are visible but unnecessary that would age his characters.Hard lines for the collarbone or the sternocleidomastoid (neck) muscle really make characters look older.One day he did a drawing that looked like a kid and his wife told him, “Now that looks like a kid!” But he lacked the skill to analyze it and figure out how he did it, so he used that drawing for reference and it took him a while to figure it out.People can really do a number on artists feelings pretty easily.CritiquesFor more depth be sure to listen to: CritiquesWhat do you do when you don’t like it but other people do?Skyheart cover story, Jake redid his Skyheart cover and asked for feedback from Will that he liked it better, and then most people online and Jake’s kids told him to go back to the original. Jake told Will, what everyone was saying and Will, said, “Yeah, I didn’t want to tell you…”Now Jake makes sure that Will gives him his honest opinion.It’s hard to have people around that can really give you an honest critique. We know how much of a letdown it is to get help and then have to change a bunch of things. But that critique is so important!Usually for Will, his best work is the work that he got lots of feedback on.Sometimes we just want to go into our secret lair and come out with a masterpiece, but often times it fails because we didn’t get help from other people.Receiving other people’s critique and feedback really accelerates our growth and the the quality of our work.Anna DaviscourtShe has a 1 year residency at Adobe working on a book for them right now. Lee is her mentor, and they have an open dialogue and critique which has made her book really good.One of the reasons the Star Wars prequels turned out the way they did is because George Lucas was surrounded by “yes men.”You don’t want to surround yourself with “yes men.”Ironically, you need to surround your people who are willing to tell you “no”.Put yourself in a position to receive critique and then listen to those critiques.That’s a way to circumvent failures and then you can use those failures as stepping stones. It. Better to have a little failure than to wait and have a bigger failure.Will’s Failures:Beginning of Will’s career: we have this project and are looking for illustrators, are you available? He would only get 1/10 of those.