If you read anything about entrepreneurship it doesn't take long to figure out that everyone is obsessed with failing. At times it seems like it's an end goal in itself, especially if it's your first time being an entrepreneur.

For a long time when I pictured failing I envisioned total crash and burn; losing tons of money and dragging your family through months of zero income as you rebuilt and started another venture. Not a fun time to say the least. However I'm learning that usually failure comes in much milder doses. Even what looks like success can be a failure. And many times failure is bringing you closer to truer success.

Trying to be an entrepreneur was the first lens through which I viewed the idea of failure. But as I began to do more "creative" work – work that results in a made thing conceived chiefly from my mind – I began to experience this milder failure, or micro-failures, if you will.

Ira Glass touches on this idea of micro-failures in his much linked interview about storytelling and the creative process. I've embedded the relevant clip (part two of four) from this interview below.

Experience is a teacher that has no substitute. I'm accepting – albeit grudgingly – that failure is a part of the process.

Dissonance

To know that you've failed in the minutiae though you have to know what qualifies as success. You have to know what is good and be able to realize (or admit to yourself) that you are falling short. There is a disconnect between how you think a thing should turn out and what it actually looks like after it's made. This disconnect is dissonance, a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements. (Apple Dictionary)

Ira Glass articulates this idea very eloquently in part three of the same interview (embedded below).

Finally, I'll leave you with a quote found in a book called Walking the Small Group Tightrope by Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson.

When experience fails to match expectations, the dissonance produces the energy for learning, discovery
and change.