November 23, 2006 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

Oh boy, did I find something cool! It’s a whole hour of fab audio on FAILURE, based around four diverse books – and a Showgirls junkie. (Yes, that movie!) It’s well worth your time if:

• You’d like to hear Natalie Goldberg talk about her memoir, The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth.

• You’re like David Schmader, who’s seen the brilliantly abysmal Showgirls a couple hundred times, and who believes: “Only by this weird misalignment of ambitions between everyone involved in the movie could they get this distinctly, thoroughly off-key freak movie. Which is a miracle.”

• You’re interested in historical failures (Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, by Scott Sandage) and would like to hear why Ralph Waldo Emerson called the 44-year-old Henry David Thoreau – his once-star student – a FAILURE(!)…at his funeral.

But WAIT! There’s more! You’ll also get to hear David Denby, author of “American Sucker,” talk about his mishaps in the stock market when the dot com bubble burst. And you’ll hear author and professor Mike Magnuson talk about how he went from blubbery Lummox to pedal-happy athlete in Heft on Wheels. It’s good stuff – hope you get a chance to listen!

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November 13, 2006 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

“I wanted a perfect ending…Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”

-Gilda Radner

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November 1, 2006 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

What’s your worst fear?

Spiders? Speaking in public? Being rushed to the hospital wearing yesterday’s underwear?

If you’re like most people, whether you admit it or not, it’s FAILURE.

And no group knows FAILURE quite like writers and artists, right? We put ourselves out there time and time again, while editors and critics earn their titles and paychecks through the sprightly act of tearing our work to shreds. Ouch.

But really, when we FAIL, what happens? Does the sky fall? Do we lose our homes? Our shirts? Or worst of all – our pride? And if all these things happen and we’re still finding time to read this article, was the outcome really so devastating?

More often than not, FAILURE is nothing more than a shift in expectations. You thought you wanted one thing to happen – like, getting published in your favorite magazine – but instead you get something else – like, a rejection letter from your favorite magazine’s editor.

But…what if it’s not FAILURE? What if, like those old Reese’s candy commercials, all of the “your-chocolate-in-MY-peanut-butter!” moments are really birthing stations for HAPPY ACCIDENTS?

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit,” said Napoleon Hill, founder of the Motivational Movement and best-selling author of Think and Grow Rich, in which 500 millionaires were mined and matrixed for their winning life formulas.

And Happy Accidents are definitely seeds of great might. They’re those well-disguised gifts that – if allowed to spawn rather than spurn – can easily become your own life’s (or the world’s!) Next Big Thing.

Penicillin was a Happy Accident, enduring more than 40 years of dismissals before it became “the discovery that changed modern medicine” in 1939. Heck, Columbus’s “New World” was a FAILURE, in that it didn’t reveal the coveted western passage to the Far East, as the notorious navigator had originally hoped to plot.

“Success is 99 percent failure,” said Soichiro Honda. Yup. His billion-dollar enterprise only came into being because Toyota wouldn’t buy his piston rings, and his other peculiar designs and patents were laughed at for decades. (Of course, when Japan’s post-WWII economy inspired Mr. Honda to slap a little engine on a bicycle – thereby inventing the Honda Motorcycle Company – Soichiro laughed all the way to the bank!)

Truth is, virtually every successful author, artist, business person, and accomplished human on the planet boasts a string of spectacular FAILURES that could trip a stampeding herd of juiced-up Paul Bunyans.

Which leads us to the Great Irony of Life: Failure is NOT a thing to be avoided, but rather, THE golden objective to pursue, accumulate, tally, gulp, and experience at every opportunity.

So here’s the magic key to creative freedom and fun, for all endeavors big and small. (Listen up! It’ll change your life…)

Ditch the pressure of “Success or bust!” and switch the goal to dogged failure.

Fail, fail, fail, and fail some more at something (or everything!) you LOVE to do, and sooner or later you are destined to succeed – whether or not you’re wearing clean underwear.

From one of Failure’s favorite protégé’s, please hear this:

May you always have the strength and courage to FAIL MISERABLY at every opportunity, and may you live on to become one of the biggest failures the world has ever known!

(As for the state of your undies, for heaven’s sake – stack the deck in your favor. Keep ‘em clean – or go commando!)

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEBSITE? Please do! Just kindly include this blurb with it:
As “Chief Creativity Evangelist” of Epiphanies, Inc., Lani Voivod is a daily poster child for Adult ADD and all its trimmings. In between creating kids’ content on Barbie.com and launching pop diatribes via her American Midol column on DeadBrain.com, Lani aims to “tickle your inner scribe or scribber - write here, write now” with her Wild Quills Ezine!

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