Learn to fail, it ain’t so bad!





I am going to be in BC for the month of June. I am doing two workshops in Vancouver. The one at the Shadbolt Centre is full with a waiting list but there is a public lecture that I am doing on Thursday that is open to the public.
I am in the process of developing a lecture/power/point entitled “Learn to fail, it ain’t so bad!” I figure I am an authority on the subject.
I would like to develop the talk crentering on the idea that failure contains information that leads to knowledge. In essence I have learned as much from my failures as my successes. What worked yesterday I am finding out doesn’t necessarily work today. Chaos equals change, change equals growth which equals ART.
If you have any great tales or pics of failure you had that your learned from please share them with me. I’m all ears! Unlike Vincent I decided to leave the other ear in tact.
I believe that true entrepreneurs never think of failure as an option. What seems like failure to others is water under the bridge to the entrepreneur as he/she is on to the next dream. The man that has no imagination has no wings. - Mohammed Ali my hero
The other workshop I am doing in Vancouver is with the Aberthau Potter’s Guild on Jun 23,24,25 and it is only open to members.
As of this week I’m actually making vases and not jugs. My friend Steve the Potter stayed over last night and we concluded that people look at Bruce Cochrane’s pots and say “how” did he do that? They then look at my pots and say “why” did he do that?  I figure as long as you got em’ looking you’re doing something right. Indifference is the worst critique of them all.

  Bruce and I will be participating in the Potter’s Market in Guelph, Ontario along with a bunch of really fine potters on May 28th and 29th

Comments

John Bauman said…
I earned a brown belt in failure. I was going for my black belt but...you know...I failed.

Somehow you'd think they'd have awarded that failure, right?
Unknown said…
I've heard it said, more years ago than you are old, Clennell, that you actually only really learn from failure. (Even if the work is fantastic, there is always something you could do better). But real failure forces you to explore the principals, science or art, to discover where you went beyond the limits of the possible.
We learned that big time in developing flameware, and the test cycle was at least 30 days long. It had to go through a cooking/heat cycle 30 times before the typical failure. Slow learning, but we did figure it out.

When I was a kid, dad once told me after I hit my finger while nailing some boards together, "If you practice enough, you can hit that finger every time!"

I didn't practice very much, and to this day I have trouble hitting my finger when using a hammper.

Failure is just a point of view.

LT

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