Freedom to Fail

Cheap enough to take a risk…

Want to write a novel?

According to my friend Jeff Jarvis, 81% of Americans believe they have a book in them.

If you want to write a novel, all that is required is that you take a piece of paper and start writing.

Maybe it’s great, and maybe it’s terrible.

You only find out by trying.

And once you try, maybe after a few pages you tear it up and start again.

And again.

And again, until you get it right.

We can do this with books and writing because the barrier to access is virtually nil.

That is, it doesn’t cost anything to try and write a novel.

And we have taken the time and invested the money to make everyone in the country print literate. That is, all know how to read and write.

So if you have an idea, just slip that paper in the typewriter (I am showing my age), word processor, and have at it. And if it doesn’t work out at first, just try again.

That is freedom to fail.

The freedom to try and fail and try again, and fail and try again until you get it right.

That is what has made print such a pliable and powerful vehicle for our culture.

Now take TV, or more properly video.

Up until now, delivering ideas in video has been expensive. Very expensive.

Cameramen, soundmen, directors, producers, writers, editors…. the list goes on and on.

And so, historically, we have been taught to think of video production as risky. And as a risky venture, we only go into it when we are really sure what we want to do. We write proposals, we budget, we meet, we agonize. And then we start to burn money.

The development of new digital technologies: cameras, edits and a web that carries video change the basic equation.

It is now as inexpensive and simple to create video as it is to create text.  Final Cut Pro is word processing for images.

So now our mentality about making video has to shift as well.

We have to stop being afraid.

Historically, television and video production have been risk-averse.  We could not afford to make a mistake because a mistake in video production was very very expensive. So video and television became very very risk averse businesses. That is why all TV shows look alike. Television early on learned to be not creative but imitative.

It crushed the potential for television.

Creativity requires the ability to fail.

A lot.

And often.

Because only by repeated failures do we learn what works and what does not work.

Otherwise all we learn to do is repeat.

Now, television can afford to fail.

Here’s the camera. There’s the door. Go do something intersting. And if it does not work out, fine. Try again. And again, and again until you get it right.

The time has come for us to embrace failure.

For the future, nothing succeeds like failure.

I know it seems counter-intuitive.

It is antithetical to everything we have taught ourselves about television over the past 70 years.

It is.