I recently read about the Museum of Failure – a traveling exhibit that showcases the world’s most fascinating flops. The description reads:
“Innovation needs failure. All progress, not only technological progress, is built on learning from past failures and mistakes. The museum aims to stimulate productive discussion about failure and inspire us to take meaningful risks.”
I’m totally on board with this idea. Is there anything more American than using failure to come back even stronger? How many test rockets blew up before Alan Shepherd left Earth gravity? Eight years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.
It got me thinking: What if we all curated our own Museum of Failure? I can imagine throwing a party for my faceplants and belly flops, right alongside my triumphs. Although I do continue to be grateful that my 20s and 30s did not include YouTube and TikTok (so that night I spent $60 on fancy drinks, all of which wound up in a dumpster, is not memorialized forever on the Internet — yeah, epic fail).
Maybe if we start viewing our spectacular faceplants as part of our victory laps, we might just summon the courage to stare down our fears and take a few audacious leaps we’ve been dreaming of. Embrace the flop, dance with the disaster, and remember that every glorious misstep is just another chapter in our life success saga.
Sadly, in the publishing business, mistakes are not only made, they are also replicated in hundreds or thousands of printed things that go out into the world. My whole list wouldn’t fit here but here are just a few tributes to my “thought it was a good idea at the time” moments.
- Trying to save the company money on a massive print job by choosing an economy grade paper stock. The printer messed up the perfect-bound page order and ran out of my special paper stock to fix it. So, 75,000 copies of a federal employee annual digest had a page 7 and a page 7a and an incorrect table of contents.
- Unfortunate typo on the cover of [County Name] Public Schools Capital Improvement Plan, which went out to 14,000 school employees without the L in public.
- My very first promotion of a website to my association’s member companies wasted a lot of company money. But, back in 1993, did you realize how picky the Internet was and that www.website/com would get you nowhere? So, 4,000 mailing labels went in the trash.
- That time I wrote an epic investigative series, thinking all the while it would put me on the map and prove I had what it took to be a professional writer. What I learned was maybe I might have asked whether the story *should* have been written rather than how viral it was going to be. The lesson there was no matter how vicious you think the Internet is, when you are the one in the crosshairs, it is so much worse. In other words, make darn sure your 15 minutes of fame are worth the vitriol you will most assuredly receive.
In my defense, I’ve been in publications for almost 35 years and probably written a few million words by now — many before spell-check and A.I. were a thing. But reflecting on it, each of these flops has shaped what I do today. I am hysterical about grammar and proofreading, and I get a happy dopamine rush when I catch errors in my own, or anyone’s documents, or billboards… or junk mail… or anything. And on those few occasions when I get a cheerful note from someone who liked what I had to say, or how I said it, I still do a little happy dance to have received a slice of approval from a stranger.
I also recognize the stress of a perfection-based industry and remember to live my professional life like Jean Giraudoux, who said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.” Plus, while I agree A.I. is a great tool, I still edit the helvetica out of it. At my keyboard, I paraphrase Apollo Creed in “Rocky II”… A.I. writes great, but I’m a great writer.
Even with the many headslaps, I’m still writing and producing things and remembering my 12th grade English teacher’s words: “Writers become great by weight.” Back in the 20th century, the output was paper, which had mass and volume. I suppose today we become better writers by the byte, but it doesn’t sound as sexy.
So be like Poppy — and the U.S.A. — and go celebrate your losses as a necessary precursor to your future wins. Maybe you’ll get to have your very own page in a magazine someday too.