Learning From Experience by Taking Small Risks You Can Afford to Fail At

Ian Dean on how George Lucas viewed failure as an experiential building block to being creative.

“Failure is another word for experience” is how Lucas put it in a 2013 interview with the US National Endowment for the Arts. He went further, explaining that creating something new means doing things with a high potential for failure, particularly when nobody has done them before. You try something, it doesn’t work, and you use what you’ve learned to try again.

We see the finished work, the polished portfolio, the film that made it to the screen, but not the weeks, months or years of experiments and failed ideas that got there.

Lucas also made an important distinction between experimenting for yourself and working for someone else. In the same interview, he talked about making small films he could afford to fail at, without worrying about the financial consequences. When others invest money in your work, he said, it becomes harder to be truly creative if you know you have to please someone.

That pressure will sound familiar to anyone making work for clients, social media or an audience with expectations.

Stage designer and artist Es Devlin has a similar approach, deliberately pushing into unfamiliar territory because, as she explains in her thoughts on making work without knowing the rules, that’s often where the interesting ideas begin.