The Art Of Failure

I was reading a very interesting interview with film director Steven Soderbergh, who directed Sex, Lies and Videotape, Oceans 11, Erin Brockovich, Traffic and others. Anyway, he had some insightful points about the process of being creative.

"A lot of people who write about art don’t understand the importance of failure, the importance of process. Woody Allen can’t leap from Annie Hall to Manhattan. He has to make Interiors in between to get to Manhattan. You’ve got to let him do that... Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn’t made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn’t have been able to make the thing that they liked. The attitude toward the stuff they don’t like is so extreme because they don’t understand the role that it has in your development. "

Creating anything is like giving birth, it is a very painful process, but some of us are drawn to do it, over and over again, despite the struggles associated with it. And, like life, failure is the most effective catalyst toward success.