Over and over again, in my work as a creative entrepreneurship coach, I hear some variation of the question, “but what if it doesn’t work?” Fear is a natural part of trying anything new, and for most artists and makers and creatives, focusing on the business side of their creative enterprise is indeed a new thing. Much of what we do as creative entrepreneurs is objectively hard! But if we never try anything new, we’ll never get anything new. Taking risks and trying new things is a vital part of what it means to be a thriving artist. And when you are bold enough to take risks, failures will happen. They’re unavoidable! The price of success, quite literally, is failure. But if that’s true, how can you conquer your fear of failure and allow yourself the freedom to take risks? How can you learn from the failures you experience so you don’t get stuck in a failure loop? Let’s discuss.

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Hello thriving artists, and welcome to Episode 38 of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I am so glad you’re here with me today! I’m artist and creative entrepreneurship coach Jennifer Jill Araya, and I can’t wait to dig into this topic with you. Addressing the fear of failure has the potential to be a powerful mindset shift for you, and I’m really excited about today’s episode.

But before we get there, I want to make sure you’re aware of a free resource I have available for you on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. As often as I discuss the fear of failure with my creative entrepreneurship coaching students, I discuss their trepidation around business finances just as often! And the free guide on my website can help you with that second problem: managing your business finances. The guide is titled “Say Goodbye to Feast or Famine: Three Financial Must-Haves for Creative Entrepreneurs,” and to get a copy of that guide sent right to your email inbox, all you have to do it go to my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, and enter your information into the contact form.  This guide discusses three problem areas in your business finances and gives you guidance about how you can establish processes for yourself in those areas, processes that will allow you to finally get off of the awful rollercoaster ride of feast or famine in your business finances. I really do think this guide can help you. Just visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, and fill out the contact form to get it.

Now let’s pivot to the main topic of today’s discussion: how to face the failures that will inevitably be part of your life as a creative entrepreneur. No one likes to experience failures, but they happen! No one is successful all the time! So how can you reframe your failures so that they help you grow and give you what you need to succeed?

Before we get too deep into this topic, I do want to take a quick moment to make sure we’re all on the same page as to what I mean when I use the word “success.” I’ve mentioned before on this podcast that I don’t really like that word, and part of the reason is that success means so many different things to different people. It comes with a lot of cultural baggage and is interpreted in many different ways by different people.

So, for the purpose of today’s discussion about how to handle failure in your creative business, when I use the term “success,” I’ll be referring to a state in which you, as an artist and as a human being, feel fulfilled by your creative work.

In this state of fulfillment, your soul is full of joy and creative energy because you love the work you do. Even if it’s sometimes difficult or troublesome, it’s work you love to do and deeply enjoy; you are creatively fulfilled by it.

The financial rewards you receive for that work are abundant enough to allow you to meet your financial needs with comfort and ease; you are able to pay all of your business expenses and also provide for your personal financial needs, with enough left over to save for a rainy day and to invest in your future. Your physical, financial needs are met with abundance. You are financially fulfilled by your creative work.

And your work schedule isn’t one characterized by chaos and constant hustling. Rather, your work schedule allows you the time you need to be a whole person who is in deep, enriching relationships with those around you. You are personally fulfilled by your creative work.

In short, when I use the term “success” in today’s episode, I’m going to be referring to a state of holistic fulfillment for you, as it relates to your creative work. You’ll experience fulfillment creatively, personally, and financially. (And if you’d like to know more about how I think about fulfillment in these terms, and how you can work within your business to be fulfilled like this, you’re in luck! I talked about it back in Episode 10 of this podcast.)

Now that we have a common definition of success, let’s look at what many people think of as the opposite of success: failure.

Like I said at the beginning of today’s episode, many creatives fear failure. Frankly, many people fear failure! Fearing failure is common enough that I would dare to say that it’s part of what it means to be human. But within the context of creative entrepreneurship, this fear, and the thousands of different ways it manifests, shows up all the time when I’m working with my coaching students. Whether it shows up as an actor’s reluctance to reach out to a casting director about an upcoming role, or whether it shows up as a musician’s procrastination to update their website with new demo recordings as recommended by their manager or agent, or whether it shows up as a visual artist’s hesitation to try a new artistic medium, fear of failure is everywhere.

In all honestly, I am anything but immune from that fear. I may be a creative entrepreneurship coach, but I am an artist and creative myself first, and I have to deal with my own fear of failure, just like you do. A lot more often than I’d like, I find myself procrastinating on necessary tasks because I’m afraid of failing at those tasks. I find myself making excuses about why a given strategy won’t work for me because I’m afraid of what might happen if I give it a try. I find myself stepping back from the hard things because I’m worried I’m not going to be able to handle that hard thing well. Avoiding situations where we think we might fail is a very human impulse, and everyone does it.

But no matter how much you try to avoid those failure-likely situations, you will experience failure. Even if you think you’re never ever taking a single risk and only making choices that are 100% sure things, you will fail sometimes. If a fear of failure is part of the human condition, so too is the experience of failure itself! There isn’t a single person on the planet who has succeeded in every single task they’ve ever attempted. Succeeding 100% of the time and in every single aspect of every single thing you do just isn’t possible. Failure is going to happen. Failure is 100% unavoidable.

Fauja Singh is the world’s oldest living marathon runner. In 2011, at the age of 100, he became the first centenarian to finish a marathon, and he also holds numerous world records for his age group. He has certainly experienced a lot of external success in his running career. He is quoted as saying, “Anything worth doing is difficult.” Anything worth doing is difficult, which means that anytime you’re doing something worthwhile, failure is one possible outcome of that situation. If a task is worthwhile, then it is also difficult, and if it’s difficult, then it’s possible you won’t succeed while doing it.

Anything worth doing comes with a likelihood of failure. But that doesn’t negate the fact that it is still worth doing.

(As a quick sidenote, Fauja Singh’s story is an amazing one. You can read his profile from the Olympics website here.)

Failure is inevitable, so worrying about whether or not you’re going to fail is a impractical worry. I can answer that question for you right now. Yes, you will fail sometimes. Not always, but failure will happen. You can’t avoid it.

So, the question to focus on isn’t how to avoid failure. The question is how to use the failure you do experience to learn and grow so that you don’t fail the next time.

Failure may be unavoidable, but if you learn from that failure, success will be the result. Like I said in the title of this episode, the price of success is failure. Only by paying that price – by going through the experience of failure – can you learn what you need to learn to later succeed.

My favorite way to think of failure is to think of it as an acronym. Don’t think of it as a word, “fail,” but think of it as F-A-I-L, which stands for “First Attempt In Learning.” Failure is only a failure if you don’t learn from the process. If an experience of failure is instead your First Attempt In Learning, then it isn’t a failure anymore – it’s an experience that teaches you and helps you.

Before you can be good at something, you have to first be bad at that thing. Only by failing at something and learning from those failures, can you get better at it! As the saying goes, you have to walk before you can run. Learning how to walk gives you the skills you need to eventually learn how to run. In your life as an artist, failure isn’t fun, but it is a necessary part of the learning process that will allow you to find fulfillment as a creative.

When you were first learning your creative medium, I’m sure you had all sorts of missteps and stumbles and failures. As a young cellist, I played more than my fair share of wrong notes and out of tune notes before I learned to play the right ones! As a student actor, I overacted and made uninteresting choices lots of times before I learned how to act with truth and integrity.

The same is true in the business side of my creative enterprise. I’ve had marketing strategies that did not lead to at all the result I was hoping for. I’ve accepted projects that ended up not being a good fit for me at all. I’ve accepted projects that I wasn’t really ready for or that didn’t match my creative skills and aptitude. In plenty of instances, I have failed.

However, remember that failure is only a true failure if you don’t learn from the experience. Failing is just your First Attempt In Learning. American psychiatrist John Dewey once said, “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” It is that reflection process that takes what might otherwise be a true failure and turns it into that “First Attempt In Learning.”

When I’ve realized that my marketing strategies were failing, I’ve examined what happened so that I could figure out what didn’t go well and why. When I’ve realized that a project I accepted wasn’t actually a good fit, I took a look in my rearview mirror to see how I could make better decisions about what projects to accept or decline in the future. I’ve examined my motives and put on my detective hat so that I could see the common threads that make a project not the right fit for me. I’ve done everything I could to learn from the experience. And what I learned helped me make better decisions in the future, decisions that allowed me to later receive more fulfillment from my creative work. Decisions that allow me to succeed in the present.

If you allow them, the lessons you learn from your past failure will lead to your present and future success.

That’s really at the heart of why the price of success is failure. Only by failing and then learning from that failure can you learn what you need to learn to later succeed.

Thinking about failure in this way is a really big mindset shift for a lot of people. It’s not the way our culture tells us to think about failure. The world around us has a “one strike and you’re out!” policy surrounding failure. But that’s not at all the truth.

Madeleine L’Engle is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read her books over and over again since I first discovered A Wrinkle in Time in elementary school, and her wise words have shaped me in many ways. The book Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life is a collection of her statements and thoughts on what it means to be a writer, a creative. And she has a lot to say about the value of thinking about failure as part of the learning process. I have two passages from this book that I want to share with you now. They’re a bit longer than the quotes I usually use in this podcast, but I think L’Engle’s thoughts are important enough to read in their entirety. Here’s what she has to say:

“With freewill, we are able to try something new. Maybe it doesn’t work, or we make mistakes and learn from them. We try something else. That doesn’t work, either. So we try yet something else again. When I study the working processes of the great artists I am awed at the hundreds and hundreds of sketches made before the painter begins to be ready to put anything on the canvas. It gives me fresh courage to know of the massive revision Dostoyevsky made of all his books – the hundreds of pages that got written and thrown out before one was kept. A performer must rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, making mistakes, discarding, trying again and again.”

“There are in the life works of all artists things which don’t work. But sometimes that painting which did not work, that piece of music which did not work, was a necessary preliminary for the next thing which did. And if the artist had never been free to fail, he never would have gone on to that next work.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, in Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life

Like Dostoyevsky throwing away hundreds of pages of his writing, like the seemingly never-ending need of musicians to practice scales and arpeggios, like an actor’s need to rehearse a scene and try lots of different approaches before choosing one, trying something new and then learning from that something when it fails is part of the creative process.

Without failure, without learning from failure, we are not able to be the incredible artists and innovative creators that we’re meant to be. We’re not able to be our best selves. Failure is the price we pay to succeed, and it is also the price we pay to be the best creatives we can be.

To take this step, to shift your mindset to one that views failure as a good thing and as a learning opportunity rather than as an awful calamity, you must first let go of your fear of failure. I fully recognize that this is much easier said than done! Like I admitted to you just a few minutes ago, I deal with a fear of failure, too! No one wants to fail, and it’s natural for us to try to avoid failure whenever and wherever we can.

But in my own work, when I notice that fear creeping into the back of my mind, I pay attention. I name it. And I allow myself to feel the fear, acknowledge that the thing that I’m about to do is scary and hard and risky, and I do it anyway. When I feel the desire to change my behavior so I can avoid a possible failure, I take a step back, give myself a moment, and take the risk.

Letting go of your fear of failure is the first step to learning from that failure and eventually succeeding as a result of that failure.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you should go out and take reckless risks in your creative life and in your business life just so that you can fail. Acting recklessly is never a good thing. But it does mean that calculated risks are golden learning opportunities and are worth taking a chance on.

What is a calculated risk? It’s one where you’ve carefully and thoughtfully looked at the possibilities available to you. You may not know everything, but you’ve done enough research and personal reflection to know that you have a specific set of options for how to proceed, and you make the choice that has the possibility of leading to the best outcome, even if that choice comes with a risk of failure. And you know that, if it does result in failure, you’ll react by learning from the experience and trying again, rather than berating yourself for a bad decision.

So much about finding that place of “freewill” that Madeleine L’Engle was talking about in the passage I just read for you is about knowing that your past self did what they could to make the best decision they could at the time, and that it’s the job of your current self to learn everything you can from the experiences you’ve had so that your present and future self can experience success. Freewill is not a place of judgment and condemnation. Freewill is a place of curiosity and learning. Allow yourself to take calculated risks and learn from them when things go sideways.

This past weekend, I ran the Queen Bee Half Marathon in my hometown of Cincinnati. This was my fifth half marathon since the spring of 2021, and in some ways, my performance in that race could be considered a failure. I had the slowest finish time of any half marathon I’ve ever completed. I walked a larger percentage of the race than I have any other half marathon to this point. If I’m only looking at my performance during this race as compared to the previous half marathons I’ve run, my performance was a failure, no doubt.

But that’s not all I’m looking at. I’m approaching the situation like a detective, full of curiosity and letting go of judgment and condemnation. At the end of July, about 2.5 months ago, I sprained my ankle, very badly. I was hiking in the Andes Mountains in Chile and took a wrong step and twisted my right ankle beneath me, before landing on it with all of my weight. I’ve been going to the doctor and doing physical therapy and icing multiple times a day since it happened, but as recently as a week ago, it still was a bit swollen and occasionally was painful. As a result of that fall, my training for this most recent half marathon was nonexistent! I ran as much as my doctor would let me, but that wasn’t all that much. In fact, my longest training run before the half marathon itself was only 4 miles. Hardly the numerous long runs that are recommended by every single half marathon training plan out there.

With that larger context in view, my performance in the race last Saturday is an unqualified success. Yes, my time was really slow, and I walked a lot of the race. But I ran the first 6.5 miles continuously, which by itself was my longest run in almost three months, and my hours of physical therapy and stretching and icing since the sprain paid off handsomely. Today, a couple days after the half marathon, my ankle is doing great. I didn’t train the way I anticipated for this half marathon, and my time was definitely not a personal record, but I made it through without reinjuring my recently sprained ankle. In my book, that is absolutely a success.

And, I’ve learned what my body is capable of without proper training for a half marathon. Which gives me that much more motivation to train exceptionally well for my next half, which will be in May.

When you find yourself in a situation that is heading toward failure, do whatever you can to focus on what is going well and capitalize on those things. Two and a half months ago, that’s exactly where I was: in a situation heading toward failure. When I realized just how bad the ankle sprain was, I began wondering how on earth I could even finish the coming half marathon. Was I going to have to withdraw from the race altogether? Was completing the event even possible? I took it one day at a time, one physical therapy session at a time, and focused on what was going well. I focused on what I could do and capitalized on those things. And I was indeed able to finish the race and not be in horrible pain the next day, an outcome that was anything but assured!

Meb Keflezighi, an Eritrean-born American marathon runner, calls this process of capitalizing on what’s going well in the midst of failure “backup goals.” In his book 26 Marathons, which I highly recommend, even if you’re not a runner, he describes how he approaches learning from failure as you’re in the midst of it. He writes,

“As a child I had chores such as fetching water or firewood. In the barren areas of Eritrea, it was often difficult to find all that we needed for daily life. I always set out with the goal of fulfilling my mother’s request, such as getting a full basket of firewood. But that wasn’t always possible. Sometimes I could find only enough to fill the bucket three-quarters full, or half full. I still worked as hard as I could to forage the next-best amount. Sometimes I couldn’t find any wood. Then I would switch to finding cow, oxen, or donkey dung for heating fuel. My mother knew that whatever I returned home with, I had given 110 percent but wasn’t always able to do what I had set out to do.”

When you’re thinking about the options available to you, take the calculated risk. Dare to do the thing that might result in failure. Meb Keflezighi continues,

“Start with your dream outcome as your A goal. Then create a series of cascading backup goals that will also motivate you. When doing the task, try your absolute best to reach that dream goal. If it becomes obvious you won’t reach that goal that day, refocus on reaching your B goal. As necessary, continue to move through your goals so you keep working hard toward the best possible outcome rather than giving up.”

And whatever happens, whichever backup goal you end up achieving, learn from the experience. Don’t ignore the experiences of failure. Learn from them.

And as you’re going through all of that, as you’re looking at the possibilities before you to determine what calculated risk is right for you to take, and as you’re evaluating your backup goals because you’re figuring out that things aren’t going to work out exactly as you’d hoped, reach out to those around you. You don’t have to do this alone. When you fail, yes, do the self-reflection necessary to learn from the experience, but don’t stop there. Ask for help.

In my recent running injury situation, I reached out for lots of help. I saw my primary care physician right after it happened. I got an x-ray of the ankle to make sure it wasn’t broken, which it wasn’t. I saw my chiropractor, and I got physical therapy exercises and stretches for building strength and to promote healing. I did what the doctors and therapists told me to do to give my ankle the best possible chance of healing. When my doctor told me I could start running again, but only if I alternated brief runs with long walks, that’s what I did. When my therapist told me that running the 14K race I’d signed up for probably wasn’t a good idea, I changed my registration to the 7K version of that race instead. And when I was given the all-clear to try the half marathon, I did it carefully and prepared with the stretches and exercises my therapist gave me. At no point in this process was I alone.

This example is from my life as a runner, not from my life as an artist, but the exact same principles apply. When I was preparing to perform the soprano solo in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana earlier this year, I worked with my voice teacher for months beforehand. I listened to every recording of the piece I could find. I practiced every single day for months and months before the concert, even taking a mini portable keyboard with me when I was traveling so I could practice in hotel rooms and rented apartments. I did what my voice teacher told me to do so that I would have the best possible chance of succeeding with the performance, and it went amazingly well.

But I’ve had situations that didn’t go as well, too. Times I got coaching for an audition and the audition didn’t go my way. Times I was in the midst of a project that wasn’t going well and I reached out to get advice as to how I could salvage the pieces before it all fell apart. But never was I alone. Never am I alone.

As I’ve said before in this podcast, no man is an island, and no creative entrepreneur is an island. You are not alone in your creative work. Use your connections and relationships within your creative industry to get the help you need, the perspective you need, the advice you need to learn from your failures, both as they’re happening and when you’re trying to figure out how to learn from what’s happened. You are not alone. Let others in to help you. Sometimes, you’re just too close to a situation to truly be able to learn from it. A colleague’s outside perspective may be exactly the perspective you need to learn and move forward, so that the failure you paid can actually lead to success.

Conversely, give kindness and grace and understanding to your fellow artists when they’re dealing with failure. Help them the way you would like to be helped yourself. Building a creative community that is supportive and welcoming for all begins with each of us recognizing that when one of us learns and succeeds, we all benefit. You aren’t alone in your creative work. Let that truth give you permission to both give and receive help as the situation warrants.

Failure is not the end. Failure is just your First Attempt In Learning. When you find yourself feeling that old fear of failure, let it go. It’s not easy, but it is possible. Let go of the fear of failure. Recognize that you will fail sometimes, and that’s ok. Have the courage to take the calculated risks, knowing that you’ll either succeed, or you’ll learn from the experience. That whatever happens, it won’t be a loss. If you feel a situation heading toward failure, do what you can to learn from the experience and capitalize on anything that is going right. Ask for help when you need it, and give help to your creative colleagues. Don’t ignore your failures. Learn from them. And one step at a time, take the lessons you’ve learned from those failures to place yourself firmly on the path of positive change and success.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I hope today’s episode helped you rethink your past experiences of failure and to view them instead as steps that made you into the amazing creative you are today. Failure isn’t a bad thing; it’s simply your First Attempt In Learning. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I would so appreciate you leaving me a rating or review. And, of course, don’t forget to subscribe so that you’re always notified when a new episode is available. I’d love for you to tell your friends about this podcast, as well. Sharing is caring! And sharing, ratings, and reviews are how new people will find this little corner of podcast-land. If you have any questions about me or the creative entrepreneurship coaching I provide, if you have any comments or feedback for me about this podcast, or if you’ve got a topic suggestion you’d like to learn about in a future episode, please feel free to reach out to me via my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. I’d love to hear from you. As always, a huge shout of gratitude goes to my husband, Arturo Araya, who does all the audio engineering for this podcast. Thank you, Arturo.

And thank you, dear listener, for being here. Allow me to encourage you to let go of your fear of failure. It is not serving you well. Take that fear and turn it into courage to take the calculated risk that will help you learn and grow and become the best creative you can be. And don’t do it alone. Give and receive help along the way. Failure is not a loss. It is a learning experience that is necessary for you to take the next step in your journey. I can’t wait to see what you create.