Permission to fail granted
A few weeks ago, Anna and I were driving home from a show where a new song we played hadn’t gone to plan. As we were hashing out why things hadn’t worked, we both came to the conclusion that bombing on stage might be one of the best things that can happen to you. It might be counter-intuitive but failure is a super power. When you take a chance and miss, you gain a ton of upside including tough skin and feedback to learn from as you consider the next risk.
Other artists go further and rely on this principle as their main creative approach. Neil Gaiman (author), Ed Sheeran (song writer) and countless stand up comedians talk about their process of creative output like a faucet: there are bad ideas in the pipe like waste water that needs to be dislodged before the truly creative stuff can be released. Most people get stuck in the initial bad ideas and then give up. It takes a fearless freedom to fail to push past.
To close, here is a video of John Mayer improvising during a live interview. Throughout he talks about his song writing process and how getting to be “fearless” is so necessary. We see clearly Mayer’s song-writing talent and amazing intuition for choosing melodic lines and harmonic chords. What we don’t see is the past: all the times he bombed but kept pushing through.