This is what success as an artist or creator looks like – a giant pile of rejection next to a tiny pile of acceptance.
I love this image from Austin Kleon’s new book Don’t Call It Art because it perfectly illustrates what too many creative people overlook.
Most things won’t work.
That may not feel great, but it’s not actually a problem.
It’s just what creativity looks like.
Too often artists aren’t willing to build that rejection pile large enough to get the acceptance pile going.
I did a training a couple days ago called The Courage Finder about how to do what scares you and at the end a woman shared her story with me.
She said she spent a bunch of time, effort, and money creating her first YouTube video and pushed herself out of her comfort zone to do so.
When she published it, after 24 hours it only had 5 views and she personally accounted for 3 of them.
She was crushed and took the video down.
I asked her if she thought it was realistic to assume her first video would be a huge success when she’s never made one before?
And pointed out taking it down after just 24 hours ensures its failure when she has no idea who might have found it a week, month, or year from now.
After watching my training, her entire perspective changed.
Once you embrace that most things you create won’t work and that you need to create them to get to the ones that do, it becomes much easier to handle rejection.
A lot of “misses” isn’t a sign of failure – it’s a sign of success.
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