Failure

Where Do You And Those In Your Life Stand On The Line

Garth Beyer

I have a fairly strong motto: keep moving forward. I consider myself a shark when it comes to business and lifestyle; I die if I stop moving. (We. all. do.)

On my pursuit of moving forward in life, who do you think I ask for advice? My family? Friends? Old professors?

More importantly, who do you ask for advice when your pursuing success or trying to move forward in life or work or academia?

If you put yourself on a line where failure is behind you somewhere and success is in front of you somewhere, where are those in your life who you are asking for advice stand? It’s not judging, it’s assessing. If you want to be successful, you have to assess your team.

A likely response is that they are right beside you. The people next to you on the line are the people you are asking for advice on pursing success. One question for you: if they knew how to move forward on the line, don’t you think they would already be forward on the line?

I not only ask where on the line those in your life stand, but also ask where you stand on the line. If you want to pursue success, it’s best to take advice from those who are ahead of you on the line, not beside or behind. Knowing where you and everyone else is on the line (and what success actually means to you) are the roots of learning how to become successful with the help of others.

Quick note: It’s not that good advice never comes from those beside you or behind you, from family members or enemies; it’s simply better not to take the chance when so many people in front of you are ready and willing to help you keep moving forward.

Lastly, remember you don’t need to leave anyone behind. Simply move forward and then extend back a helping hand.

 

Stay Positive & Please Don’t Die Standing Still (Or Asking Advice From Those Who Are)

 

Two Of My Favorite Words

Garth Beyer

Agency and urgency.

Agency means we have a choice. We always have a choice. Everything that happens, we’ve done something that lead to it. If we want something different in the future, we only need to change our present actions, and agency means we can do that.

Urgency, in my opinion, is more powerful than agency. Urgency can outrun agency. Urgency is like looking at tasks as if they were 100 meter runs. You’re running too fast to think if your leg is sore, if the shoes don’t fit right, if you have friends in the stands cheering you on or enemies up close hoping you fall behind. Urgency means you give up a bit of agency, a bit of observation of what’s around you while you focus just on what’s ahead.

Agency is about exploring options and then acting on one of them. Urgency is about acting on it quickly.

If you’re confused, hurt, or worried, you need to recognize you have agency.

If you’re afraid, fed up with your lack of success, or nervous, you need to grab hold of urgency.

 

Stay Positive & Fail Fast To Succeed Faster, Choice Is Yours

 

Just Because You’re Wrong, Doesn’t Mean You’re Not Right

Garth Beyer

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Let me tell you a quick story.

I was recently working on a fictional newsletter to help me learn InDesign. I had an instructor looking over my shoulder every now and then to comment on my work. I designed the newsletter for the shareholders of a fictional railway company. Naturally, my newsletter had the company’s name as the header. It was a simple black text on a light blue background (colors of the company).

To make the distinction that the newsletter was for shareholders, I put exactly that – “shareholders” – in black type, half over the light blue background box and half on the white background (the paper).

Some would see it as I saw it: beautiful balance between who is most important (the company and the shareholders), slightly abstract, and it was the first thing to catch someone’s eye – rightfully so. The instructor saw it differently.

She saw it as unorganized (even though I had every bit of the text perfectly aligned with the rest of the page). She saw it as distracting (forgetting it’s the part of text everyone should see first).  Essentially, she thought it was wrong.

“Wrong?” Sure, I’ll give it to her. It could have been improved.

But, “not right?”

I like to remember the Law of the Many, which has two focal points worth briefly mentioning. First, the theory of it implies that there will always be at least one person in the world that thinks what you did was right. And it’s often more than one person.

Second, the Law of the Many gives you the right to reject rejection, to deny someone’s disapproval of what you did. If I had 20 instructors tell me it was wrong, I might think differently about it. But one, just one person telling me it’s wrong?

Failure is a hard thing to sell. If you’re wise, you won’t buy it.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Ever Forget That There’s Always Room For Improvement

Garth E. Beyer

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Catch Yourself

Garth Beyer

When you fall, fall hard. Learn from it and get back up.

But before you fall, try to catch yourself.

Too many artists get the two confused and try to catch themselves falling or rely on some other safety net to prevent getting hurt, to prevent failure. Don’t.

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What you want to do is to catch yourself losing track of your goals, or your motivation, or swaying into oncoming traffic. To do so, you have to develop three elements to your psyche.

1. Cautiousness

2. Observation

3. Mental Risk Taking

If you’ve read any of my content before, you’re likely wondering why I am advising cautiousness. I am all for a gamble, but you need to know the consequences going into it. To be cautious is to acknowledge the potential negative consequences.

To understand a decision, you have to observe everything about it. Have other people made a similar decision? What factors may affect your choice later that are not now? What are all the pieces that need to be in place before a decision can be made effectively? Essentially, what’s changing, in constant motion and how does it affect you?

Mental risk taking means to think through the unthinkable, the impossible, to explore every avenue available. Have you ever heard someone say there are only X number of ways to do something? The obstacle of mental risk taking is to think of one more way then what has already been thought of. Better yet, think of Parkour. Ask a regular pedestrian what is the fastest route to get from A to B and they will give you directions. Ask a tracuer and they will tell you to jump over this fence, run through that lot, leap over this creek and race across the rusted bridge. Something a layperson wouldn’t.

 

Stay Positive & Try Not To Fall, But When You Do, Fall Hard

Garth E. Beyer

The Three Whales

Garth Beyer

Twitter Whale

The killer whale and the serial whale are always out to get you.

The killer whale is that large weight holding you back from completing your project (or for some, starting it). The killer whale, well, kills. It kills your passion, your motivation, your hope, and eventually your art (or for some, just the idea of it).

The serial whale is the whale that you actually come face to face with while you’re doing the hard work of making your art. The serial whale doesn’t communicate through loud screeches and cries. No. The serial whale has a voice that it uses to tell you you’re not good enough, that your goal can’t be reached, that you should just give up. (Who knew the little voice syndrome was actually a whale talking to you. Things get more and more weird.)

Then you have the fail whale (pictured above).

The fact the whale is smiling says more than words can right now.

 

Stay Positive & The Fail Whale Is Okay, It’s The Other Two That Need To Be Poached

Garth E. Beyer

Popeye’s Error

Garth Beyer

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Sadly, Popeye is becoming less popular. It’s hard to come by someone younger than 20 who thinks of Popeye when I say, “I yam what I yam!”

While the fading memory of Popeye as a character is saddening, what’s worse is the decumbent understanding of Popeye’s Error.

It’s easy to figure that Spinach profit was long and prosperous after Popeye hit the television. What few ask though: why Spinach?

Why couldn’t Popeye eat nails, or grit, or gunpowder?

In 1870, the German chemist Erich von Wolf tested the amount of iron within spinach and in his reporting, he incorrectly placed a decimal point so that it read that there is 35 milligrams of iron in Spinach rather than 3.5. As a result of the high amount of iron in spinach, Popeye was given it to become strong and mighty – a true sailor.

This fact – Popeye’s Error – is one we must continue to remember. Success takes critical inquiry and the story of Popeye is the outlier, the rare case when making a measurable error leads to something remarkable.

It hurts to fail. It hurts worse to fail and have others succeed by feeding off your failure.

 

Stay Positive & Unless It’s Intentional (in that case, I think we should talk)

Garth E. Beyer

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Through All Of The Crap

Garth Beyer

It’s worth sharing Richard St. John’s three-minute talk of which I learned that to succeed, we must persist through crap.

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Here are some favorite articles I have written on criticism, rejection, assholes, and pressure.

 

Stay Positive & Here’s Some On Persistence Too

Garth E. Beyer