Fail to Succeed to Advance Your Writing Career

A friend posted this Michael Jordan quote on her LinkedIn profile recently:

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”

The same day, I listened to musician Jon Batiste on the Armchair Expert podcast. Very early in his career, he and the Stay Human band would jump on a subway car and busk for the passengers. The idea eventually morphing into what he called “social music” — using music as a way to connect with people on an emotional level, meeting people where they are.

In the course of the conversation about that time, he said he and his bandmates had a clear intent to try things. To put themselves out there and see what worked. (Conversation starts about 14:23 and I don’t know where to tell you to stop because I found the whole thing compelling).

He said they’d remind each other:

“Let’s get rejected today.”

Wow. What a hard thing to do.

Michael Jordan and Jon Batiste are two very different people with two very different talents. Both equally brilliant at what they do–basketball and music respectively. And both their messages are the same: In order to succeed, you have to fail.

You have to try lots of things and submit lots of times and take a lot of shots and probably get kicked off a few subway cars before things start to click and fall your way. And even when they do, you still can have a miss, get a rejection from a publication, airball a shot, play a wrong note.

Just like a rejection today doesn’t mean you won’t have success tomorrow, a success today doesn’t mean you’re through with rejection. If only!

Sylvia Plath said, “I love my rejection slips. They show my I try.”

Isn’t that just it for the creative life. For life at all, really.

Even Tennyson got in on the action, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

We’re all just walking through life risking rejection and failure at every pass. But if we don’t take that risk, are we living at all? Sure, it can be safer to scribble in a journal, to avoid the structure class, to refuse to join a critique group…but the safe things can keep our writing insular and probably stagnant. Or, we can join a writing association, take a class, read a craft book, and watch our skills improve on the page, this growth fueling potential success.

Does that mean we’ll be published? I can’t answer that. But if you derive joy from writing and seeing your skills improve and testing the boundaries of your capabilities, that might be success enough. For me, I’ll keep writing regardless of where my publishing journey takes me. It’s in my DNA to write. Even if those words never see print beyond my journal or hard drive or this blog.

When the writing/revising/querying/marketing gets hard–and it will–we need to remind ourselves that it’s all just another paving stone of our larger path. Our path to the next success or the next breakthrough. Every edited line or rejected manuscript is bringing us closer to the next level of our craft, the true mark of success.

And when you get there, then perhaps you’ll find external success, too. I can’t guarantee that, but I can guarantee you certainly won’t find it by attempting to avoid rejection or failure.

So fail on writers! Let’s go get rejected today.

Featured image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay