The Bobby Rock Quick Hit - 9-13-23 - Embracing Our Old Friend... Failure!
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Hey Gang -
Home for a few days this week, but just about to step into a full Lita Ford excursion: 8 shows in 10 days. Oh yes! Bring it on. I will be checking in a time or two from this run, so stay tuned for updates. Here's a recent itinerary of what's ahead. I don't think it's entirely complete, but it's close:
This week, we hit the archives for some Steven Pressfield wisdom (BR Newsletter #30 - 10-21-21) and a poignant reminder: Failure is essential! Let's accept it (when we must), embrace it, then move on. It's a crucial, non-negotiable part of anyone's journey where personal evolution and improvement are valued.
Onward we roll....
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Embracing Failure
Steven Pressfield is a seasoned sage of the writing world. He has penned numerous novels and screenplays, as well as a series of best-selling non-fiction titles aimed at writers and other creatives—all of which I have devoured through the years—including Do the Work, Turning Pro, The Artist’s Journey and his must-read masterwork, The War of Art.
Obviously, the guy is a hell of a writer. But one of the reasons I believe his non-fiction work resonates with so many is because he has always written with an unflinching transparency about his own experiences as a writer… and the untold amount of struggle and strife he’s had to deal with through the years. Looking for another “How to Pen a Best-seller in 30 Days” type of vibe? You’ll have to look elsewhere. Pressfield’s work is built around the grind, the long-game, the daily engagement of process, and the never-ending battle against "Resistance with a capital R”—which remains at the core of his thesis. Likewise, his personal journey has been brutal, and he’ll be the first to tell you about it in a way that is both self-effacing and encouraging.
Which brings us to a compelling video he recently posted in one of his weekly emails:
The theme of the email was “A Truckload of Rejection.” In it, he wrote about our culture’s tendency to celebrate and highlight all of the wins, the victories, the trophies, the accolades, and the "best-sellers," even pointing out that his own website does this. (Whose doesn’t?)
In the video, we see Pressfield loading a number of storage bins into his truck, each packed with his various unpublished (AKA rejected) novels and screenplays. And believe me, as a writer, I could feel my sphincter clench at the thought of the untold amount of hours he invested in every single one of those works, only to watch them all retire to the solitary confinement of a storage facility, never to be read again. I could literally feel his pain, mainly because I, too, have my own backlog of such work (along with that graveyard of ancient cassette demos that so many of my old-school musician colleagues still have).
"All the published work you see from a writer is just the tip of the iceberg," Pressfield says. "The rest of it is (unseen) below the surface, but you still need to write it.”
It was a poignant, real-life embodiment of the dogged work ethic—and the sheer volume of output—Steven encourages us to cultivate in our own practice if we want to be professionals.
Point well taken.
And then, here’s where my mind went:
Stephen Pressfield is a bad motherfucker based on all of the great books he’s published. But what role did these unpublished failures have in his ability to write all of those published successes? A major one, I would guess.
And likewise, I would submit: Don’t we all have that “truckload of rejection” in our own experience? Maybe our failures are not in hard-copy form like Steven’s, but my guess is that most humans have a truckload of failed ideas, projects, interactions, proposals, and various other works that either bombed-out or never went anywhere, and then were filed away in some forgotten scrap heap. And while we all want to forget about most of them, isn’t there some merit in acknowledging that these failures have been part of our own personal “school of hard knocks” curriculum that has inevitably played some crucial role in where we are today?
In other words, these supposed failures have all been at least as important to our current level of evolution as our successes, if not more so. In fact, I would argue they have likely been most essential to our growth and development because, after all, how much do we really learn on those occasions when we experience rousing success?
Final Thought
To a lesser degree, I think we may also classify something as a failure because it was either never completed (my specialty), or it never got out there enough to ever truly be rejected! Still, though, the work and effort invested in an unfinished, back-burnered, or poorly marketed project never withers in vain. You still had to do the “reps.“ You still had to log the time. And that level of in-the-trenches work always matters, even if that particular project never bore any obvious fruit—or at least hasn’t yet.
So here’s to doing the work and reaping the fruits—even if the harvest winds up in a different field.
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Thanks again, everybody. Connect soon!
Until then,
BR
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