December 27, 2006 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

Sometimes it helps that even the most brilliant folks know firsthand the winning stench of bumbling defeat. Fortunately, creativity consultant David Straker has compiled a short list of some pretty impressive FAILURES in history who somehow transcended their shortcomings. (Hopefully, the info’s accurate!)

Here’s a handful of his picks with a few of mine:

• Beethoven’s music teacher once told him that as a composer, he was hopeless.

• J. K. Rowling was rejected by an agent – and then by several publishers – before Harry Potter found his passage to the Muggle world.

• Charles Darwin’s father told him he would amount to nothing and would be a disgrace to himself and his family.

• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he, Disney, had “no good ideas.”

• In 1962 the Decca Recording Company turned down the opportunity to work with the Beatles, claiming, “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out.”

• One of Thomas Edison’s teachers told Tommy he was too stupid to learn anything.

• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

• Deemed unattractive by producer Darryl Zanuck, Marilyn Monroe was dropped by 20th Century Fox in 1947 after only one year under contract.

• Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school in his sophomore year. He was persuaded to come back and placed in a learning disabled class. He lasted a month.

To enjoy Mr. Straker’s massive list of quotes involving FAILURE and creativity, principles, tools, articles and quotes about all matters around being creative and using creativity,” visit CreatingMinds.org.

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December 15, 2006 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

“When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn’t want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.”

-George Bernard Shaw

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December 2, 2006 by Lani Voivod, Chief Scribbler.

An interview excerpt with best-selling novelist Amy Tan (of Joy Luck Club fame) from www.Achievement.org; June 28, 1996, Sun Valley, Idaho.

In this insightful interview with one of America’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, Ms. Tan addresses a few aspects of failure – and success, for that matter – that might surprise you. For this post’s purposes, we’re jumping into the interview on page 6 of its 7 pages…

Q: Speaking now only of your writing career, what setbacks or detours have you had along the way and how have you dealt with them and learned from them? Self-doubts, fear of failure?

A: I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure. I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.

The success took me by surprise and it frightened me. On the day that there was a publication party for my book, I spent the whole day crying. I was scared out of my mind that my life was changing and it was out of my control and I didn’t know why it was happening. I thought it would ruin things, because at that moment in my life I was fairly happy. I was getting along with my mother. My husband and I had been married for a long time, we were happy, we had our first house, we had great friends, we were doing well, we weren’t starving. We had a comfortable living and I thought, “Things are going to get messed up here and I have no control over this.” I could already see how people were treating me differently.

That’s the scary thing. You know, when people say, “How has success changed you?” you have to say, “No. How have people changed toward you as the result of success?” And “How have you dealt with that change in how people have changed toward you?” That’s the most difficult thing.

So I went through a terrible period of feeling that I had lost my privacy, that I had lost a sense of who I was. I was scared by the way people measured everything by numbers: where I was on a list, or how many weeks, or how many books I had sold. By the time it came to the second book, I was so freaked out, I broke out in hives. I couldn’t sleep at night. I broke three teeth grinding my teeth. I had backaches. I had to go to physical therapy. I was a wreck!

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away. You know, 100 pages here, 200 pages there and I’d say, “Is this what they liked in The Joy Luck Club? Is this the style, is this the story? No, I must write something completely different. I must write no Chinese characters to prove that I’m multi-talented.” Or “No, I must write this way in a very erudite way to show I have a way to use big words.” It’s both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success. It took me a long time to get over that, and just finally being able to breathe again and say, “What’s important? Why are you a writer? Why did you write that book in the first place? What did you learn? What did you discover? What was the most rewarding part of that?”

Don’t think of what’s going to happen afterwards. If it’s a failure, will you think what you wrote was a failure, that the whole time was wasted? If it’s a success, will you think the words are more valuable?

That crisis helped me to define what was important for me. It started off with family. It started off with knowing myself, with knowing the things I wanted as a constant in my life: trust, love, kindness, a sense of appreciation, gratitude. I didn’t want to become cynical. I didn’t want to become a suspicious person. Those were the things that helped me decide what I was going to write.

If you’re interested in reading this interview in its entirety, just click here. And by all means, consider bookmarking Achievement.org – “A Museum of Living History.” It’s a robust, fascinating, inspiring site!

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