Failure: The Source Of Success

“A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

Next up, Schrödinger’s Hot Pocket®, which is both ice cold and lava hot at the same time.

In my life, I have been bad at a lot of things.  I’m still bad at most of them, but there are a few things that I’m good at.  The way I got good at them started with being willing to experiment.  By experimenting, I learned a lot of different ways to fail, just like the programmer that got turned down by the waitress – he had an error in connecting to the server.

When I failed, I learned how I failed.  I then stopped doing those things.  But experimenting always has the possibility of failure.

I’ve taken my sons through the same process – I’ve told them many times, “You can figure it out.”  Before he left for college, I taught The Boy how to cook steak.  I thought about teaching him how to make meringue, but I know the Australians hate it – they usually boo meringue.

I hope this joke doesn’t come back at me.

It’s not a lot for a legacy, but he grills steak like a demigod now.  He’s so popular that his college roommates pitched in and bought him a charcoal grill.  The Boy told me he grilled a chicken the other night for two hours, but the chicken still wouldn’t tell The Boy why he crossed the road.

How do you learn to cook well?

The same way that you learn anything – by experimenting, failing, and eventually getting it right.

Once you get it right?  Then you can exploit the knowledge.

A group of researchers looked at just this pattern.  The title of their article says it all:  Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers.  You can find it here (LINK).

Related:  blind Martians are now known as “brailleins”.

What are hot streaks?  In my experience, it is when a person has exactly the right skills and is in exactly the right place.  The authors of the article indicate that those skills come from prior experimentation.  That is what I’ve observed in my life, too.

One example the authors use is Peter Jackson, who is most known for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and also the billionaire that looks the most like an actual hobbit®.  All of Jackson’s previous work had prepared him for his streak, which in this case was The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Originally the studio wanted a product tie-in:  Frodo would have connected the keys to JCPenney®, Dillards©, Macy’s™, and all the restaurants in the food court and then tie them to the One Ring.  Then they’d have one ring to rule the mall.

What’s the difference between a Halfling and a Hobbit?  Copyright.

The work that Jackson had done prior to this was important – it taught him all of the things necessary to make a movie, and making The Lord of the Rings was no ordinary movie, since the movies were all filmed at one time.  On top of that, the movie required special effects on a scale that was unprecedented – they had to make Elijah Wood look Frodo-genic.

It was all coupled with Jackson’s fierce devotion to the source material so that the movies would be faithful to Tolkien’s vision.  He even explained why the Eagles couldn’t fly the hobbits into Mordor – it turns out they were on tour.

Making the three movies cost around $300,000,000, so there was quite a bit of trust involved.  Without his prior experience, no one would have given Peter Jackson the job.  Without his prior experiments and his prior failures, he wouldn’t have had the ability to make the film.

But he did have that ability.

Originally Jackson wanted to make a cartoon, but the studio thought that was sketchy.

The movies collectively made nearly $3,000,000,000 (which, for scale, is what we send to the Ukraine every 45 minutes) at the box office, so investing in these films made approximately 10 times the initial investment.  The movies weren’t just popular with people, they were popular at the awards, winning 17 out of 30 Oscars® and getting positive reviews and not getting slapped by Will Smith.

By nearly any measure, these are three of the best films ever made, so I’d call that a pretty good streak.

Peter Jackson must be driven, because he made hundreds of millions of dollars and still goes to work, but I’m thinking he only works on stuff he wants to work on.

That’s the power of being on a streak.  The components are simple:  experimentation, finding a challenge worth taking on that the experiments have prepared you for, and then exploiting those skills to take on the challenge at full speed.  That’s when the streak starts – the right person is at the right place at the right time.

I started teaching my sons karate when they were young.  I don’t know karate – I just enjoy kicking children.

My comment would be to keep experimenting because the experiments will provide skills.  And the combination of those skills will, perhaps, lead to opportunities and places that you’d never expect.

I have learned one secret that I’ll share with you about how to make a steak taste better:  eat it around a bunch of vegans.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

41 thoughts on “Failure: The Source Of Success”

  1. As an engineer, I am familiar with something not working day after day after day as you tinkered with it until the one single day it finally did work and it was time to move on to another project. Many days of frustration balanced by a brief day of triumph. You gotta be self motivated to be a good engineer.

    1. Indeed. I’ve made a lot of things that *almost* were perfect before I hit perfect.

    1. Ricky, who said “Revenge is a dish best served cold”?

      OJ Simpson “Won” with the glove that didn’t fit, eh? How’s he doing today? Delayed revenge, dude.

      Putin only has to outlast us.

      SO, when gasoline is over 10.00 a gallon and the grocery store need’s guards, remember to laugh.

      Given all the good news about western states water and power issues, pretty soon even Aesop will be enjoying rolling backouts and water rationing. Good times were had by all 🙂

      Bread and Circuses, ALL in FUN until we run out of Bread. Keep cheering for your military Sports ball team.

      Buy food and secure safe water, it’s important.

  3. What’s the difference between a Halfling and a Hobbit? Copyright.

    Embarrassing admission: I don’t get this one. Help!

    1. In role playing games (like Dungeons & Dragons, not the ones with silk, leather, masks and feathers), “Hobbits” are called “Halflings” instead because of copyright issues with the Tolkien estate.

      1. Thanks, McChuck, but I’m still confused. Both terms are used in Tolkien’s books. Can’t see why one infringes copyright and the other doesn’t.

        But then, there’s a lot of things I don’t see …

  4. If not for the hot streaks, I wouldn’t bother streaking at all. But that is another matter, one that my lawyers advise me not to talk about.

    Yes, indeed, practice makes perfect. Or, so I am told. In my own life I’ve been plagued numerous times by a counter-intuitive, odd phenomenon known colloquially as beginner’s luck. The first deck I built, as a complete novice, was a tri-level work of art that still stands nearly 3 decades later. The next ones, um…not so much. The first short story I completed in my late teens sold immediately, but I couldn’t give another one away free for over a decade. My first week on the job as a newly-minted software engineer, I asked the right question of the right support person and fixed a very obscure connection issue that had baffled the senior geeks for months. I’ve been struggling since then to recreate the magic.

    Early, overwhelming success proves nearly as demoralizing over time as repeated failure to the newbie. “What have you done lately?” is the phrase that echoes and haunts. There are more than a few One Hit Wonders out here, wistfully recalling our brief glory. And that is where perseverance comes into play. Rabid determination and that interminable, infectious Wilder optimism (hmmm, sounds like a communicable disease).

  5. It’s well known you can’t go from cooking your first steak to a streak without the “rddd” work added.

  6. John, I’ve testified as an “expert” witness several times. The first time, the attorney asked me if I had over 10,000 hours experience in that field. After 15+ yrs. working in that field at that time, I said yes. He informed me that level of experience, along with an advanced degree, is used to evaluate as an “expert”.

    And, strongly agree that you have to screw up/fail multiple times…or you’ll never become an “expert”.

    I sure have.

  7. Peter Jackson also took his experience in film and created a masterpiece documentary called, “They shall not grow old”.

    He took old film from the wars shot at a various frames per second and choreographed an amazing historical film. If you have not seen it I highly recommend it. It is colorized as well but not quite a big fan of colorization.

    1. I agree that They Shall Not Grow Old is worth searching out. I especially liked that when they needed to add the sound for a cannon cycling, Jackson had one in his collection that he pulled out to use.
      Opie Odd

  8. That, in my humble opinion, is what made the early users of the home computers so awesome. They had little in the way of documentation – hell, even manuals in English really didn’t exist.
    But, they hacked around, trying things, learning from their mistakes, and getting a level of expertise that led to the next generation of PCs (from CPM to MS-DOS and beyond).
    The same thing is true for mothers – the things they learn from making mistakes makes them awesome grandmothers. You can learn from a young woman who’s helped raised younger brothers and sisters, and probably better than from any level of ‘professional expert’.
    The fact that most kids not only don’t have younger brothers and sisters, or any babysitting experience, makes their own parenting adventures, when grown, very difficult. They are prone to listen to confident idiots, rather than those who have actually raised kids.

    1. My late stepmother, may she RIP, was the worst. She never had kids, yet was an expert on telling me how to raise mine.

    2. Can confirm. My beloved bride was the middle child in a ginormous late-50s family, and she literally raised her four younger siblings by herself after their mother slid off the deep end. She also babysat every other kid in her neighborhood two or more years younger than she (including at least one of the infamous Massapequa Baldwin brothers, who she regarded, in toto, as undisciplined brats). When our own children came along she barely shrugged, juggling a couple of Irish twin sons like she was born to do it (bless her motherly heart).

  9. Speaking of steak, guess what I’m grilling tonight.. yep, a large, thick bone in ribeye. Also some hand cut fries.

  10. FWIW, you forgot to apply Hollywood Math (the kind that led Paramount to explain to Art Buchwald that his share of the profits from Coming To America meant that he owed them money. Really, they tried that, in open court.):

    1) Double the cost. Because for the LOTR trilogy, for that $300M production budget, they spent an equal amount – $300M – on PR for the series. So the production cost them $600M.

    2) Halve the gross. Because they don’t get to keep about 50% of what a film makes. Distribution and revenue sharing with movie houses (which aren’t run as non-profits) means studios only get 50¢ on ever dollar they rake in. So that $3B? That’s actually $1.5B.

    3) Do the math now: LOTR made 2½ times expenses, in Reality. Not 10. (And WB tried to cheat Jackson out of some of his points off the gross. Because it’s Hollywood, where the definition of a producer is: Someone who f**ks you…out of something.) Still a respectable return, and why they asked Jackson back to do The Hobbit.

    Which brings up the bigger point.

    Jackson in particular, and Hollywood in general, is a really, really poor example pool to use to illustrate how success comes from failure.
    (Unless we want to talk about how unknown Jackson and his movies were outside The Biz prior to LOTR.)
    Nobody fails up in Hollywood. You Succeed in, and up.
    You make an epic failure? You’re The Guy Nobody Ever Calls Again.
    That’s how it works, in general. (If you have a string of successes, they’ll spot you a couple of clinkers.)
    But nobody has a string of failures, and then breaks out all fabulous.
    Doesn’t work like that, and in fact just the opposite.

    George Lucas had niche critical success with THX-1138. That success, not failure, got him the okay to make a summer cruising movie called American Grafitti. That did well enough on every level that they let him make another small sci-fi flick for DGA scale, but he negotiated all receipts from tie-ins, like t-shirts and toys, as part of his compensation. He made his first billion from Kenner Toys for Star Wars. That was “F— You” money, and after that, he made whatever he wanted. (Nota bene he’s only actually directed about 4 movies, lifetime, yet is a “genius whiz kid” director, who sold his life’s work to Mauschwitz for a cool $6B.)

    Failures in there? Nil. (Unless we want to count Jar Jar.)

    Hollywood isn’t where you want to look for people who failed their way to success.
    Doesn’t work like that.
    People there fail their way to parking cars and bussing tables, not the other way around.
    It’s been the real-life version of American Idol for 100+ years, before the TV version came out.
    It’s the diametric opposite of where you go for failure-to-success stories.
    Hollywood is where you go from success to failure, times beyond counting.

    If you’re very, very lucky, you get a Second Chance, and become the Comeback Kid, going from Sucess to Failure, and back to Success.

    Ask Robert Downey Jr. about that.

    Failure to success: politics. (Which is just Hollywood for ugly people).
    Lincoln.
    Churchill.
    Reagan, even.

    Or invention: Edison.
    The Wright Brothers.

    Or business: Sam Walton.
    Ray Kroc.
    Harlan Sanders.
    Trump.

    Great theme. Not-so-good example.
    Unless you were trying to illustrate going from failure to success.
    (See what I did there?)

    1. Aesop – Having watched The Northman (and enjoying it as a movie for the first time in forever), I am genuinely curious about the concept of succeeding in and up. There are many actors and actresses and directors that do smaller successes but never really seem to “break” into the true success. Is it just luck? Timing? Or spirit of that particular year?

      I have seen the figure of “double the cost for marketing” multiple other places. Does that go into the overall consideration of “success”?

      1. TB-

        Just like James Garner was screwed by NBC, saying there were zero profits from “The Rockford Files”.

        He won too but a non-disclosure clause prohibited him from any discussion of the settlement.

      2. Critical success gets you more chances to play.
        Box office success gets you the keys to the casino.
        Strictly speaking, a working actor (i.e only working as an actor), writer, or director is a success. They’re already ahead of 85% of the competition.
        Film school dropout Director Robert Rodriguez was literally a guinea pig for Big Pharma to get the $10K he needed to make Once Upon A Time In Mexico, which he was looking to just get his money back, and instead became the actual Talk Of The Town, and he’s never looked back.
        Harrison Ford was a stagehand and finish carpenter making more money than he ever made as an actor building custom home sound studios for Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, etc., when George Lucas called him and begged him to take one more crack at acting in a little movie called American Graffitti.
        Stallone was virtually starving and living in poverty in L.A., and was turned down by every studio in town, twice, because he wouldn’t sell them the script for his boxing movie unless they let him play the lead character. Finally Irwin Winkler decided to make the pic under that condition, on n indie budget, and life imitated art. Winkler got the Oscar for Best Picture, and Stallone was a superstar overnight.

        It’s luck, timing, but most of all, the chops to get it right, coupled with the determination to never give up.
        There’s a lot of people who never give up; but they actually suck, and don’t know it, and they should give up.
        There’s also the X factor: no one knows what’s going to strike a chord with the audience.

        When Sony bought Columbia, they brought Japanese business sense to Hollywood, and got kicked in the junk.
        “We see last year you made 62 movies; 5 were big hits, 12 broke even, and the other 45 lost money, and 10 of those not only lost money, they made almost nothing. Why don’t you only make hit movies??.”
        They were dead serious when they asked this question.

        The five minutes of laughter in response was something they were quite unprepared for.

        “Because nobody knows what’s going to be a hit! (you incredible idiots)”

        Famed script doctor on hundreds of movies, and the guy who wrote “The Princess Bride”, William Goldman, wrote his autobiography working in The Biz. The entire movie industry in a nutshell: “Nobody Knows Anything.”

        https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/457097-nobody-knows-anything-not-one-person-in-the-entire-motion

        1. Thank you for the response Aesop. It is sort of what I thought (I did not know the story about Rodriguez, but was familiar with Ford and Stallone).

          :”Working” is undoubtedly a big factor as well, although I suspect many people will stretch that definition as far as they can to say they are “working” in the field. In my field it probably functions the same: The good ones (20%) are doing 80% of the business; the “less good ones” (80%) scramble for the rest.

          “There’s a lot of people who never give up; but they actually suck, and don’t know it, and they should give up.” The day I realized I was not going to be able to do any of the things I thought I was really destined to do was one of the hardest days of my life. Fortunately I had a long list, so I got to keep reliving that same day over and over.

    2. Excellent, excellent comment.

      I was certainly a bit too liberal with my use of the term failure – none of my steaks have been failures (at least none exploded and caused injuries) and all have been tasty – it’s just a matter of making the perfect steak with the sear just right and the malliard reaction and . . .
      now I’m hungry.

      You’re right Peter Jackson’s earlier films weren’t failures, but no one would compare them to The Lord of the Rings. They were necessary experiments that taught him the way to make a great film, from techniques to people that can help.

      Politics wasn’t considered in the article – it was really creatives.

      Well considered and appreciated criticism. And, see, this post didn’t explode and hurt anyone!

  11. Been waiting for your take on Biden’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ and it’s director Nina…..???

    1. A bit on Monday, probably more within the next month. She’s an insufferable twit.

  12. Doctor Schrödinger came home from work one night, to find his wife in a very distressed state.

    “Erwin!” she exclaimed. “What did you do to the cat? The poor thing looks half dead!”

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