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This is the October 8th edition of my newsletter, This Week Paul Likes... Sign up for it here.
…“Why You Should Practice Failure”: Loved this short essay from the great FS blog. If the best lessons in life come from the biggest setbacks, why not induce those failures? Why not force the eff ups and in so doing learn faster? Get better?
The piece quotes from Amelia Earhart’s autobiography and how pilots in her day would intentionally stall the engines when learning to fly. “Unless a pilot has actually recovered from a stall,” Earhart wrote, “has actually put his plane into a spin and brought it out, he cannot know accurately what those acts entail. He should be familiar enough with abnormal positions of his craft to recover without having to think how.
“If we don’t practice failing, we can only safely fly on sunny days.”
How can you intentionally screw up in your creative pursuits? Well, I’ll say here what I’ve said before: Writers should keep a journal. It’s a record of your thoughts, sure, but also a chance to experiment day after day with a style you’d like to adopt or a structure you’d like to impose on a piece. The point of the journal is to learn from what you’re telling yourself.
Why not learn faster by failing now, when no one else can see you?
