Failure is only failure if you don't learn from it.

Or; what the heck is that

My lovely wife Karen is a practicing potter in whatever spare time her NHS job allows her. When she started on the wheel she was told something like “you’ll screw up a thousand pots before you get one that's good”. I think that was an exaggeration based on what she's made, but in essence it is incredibly true.

There is an expecting for instant success and instant perfection based , in part at least, on how social media shows the high points of people's lives. There are never Instagram posts of the crap meal, the misshapen crochet amirigumi, the painting that went wrong. We see the highlights of people's creativity.

For every painting I share there are a dozen that got screwed up and thrown away. Half a dozen that I finished but that didn't work. A bunch that didn't get past the sketch stage because I lacked the ability to pull them off. A hundred that never made it outside my head.

And do you know what? All of these are more important than the successful pictures. Because from each of these I learnt something. I learnt about colour and perspective and composition and about sticking with an idea to make it work.

We learn from failure and mistakes. So fail spectacularly and move on. Move on to a new idea or move on to a new version of the idea that failed. But apply what you learned from failing. And if you're not learning from mistakes and failures, start now and learn.

If making things is important to you, then learning to do it better should be too.

Make something and then make something better.