A Noble Fail
I’ve been thinking about failure a lot recently. We won’t get into the personal side of that thought process, but in terms of work there’s a rich seam of fails to mine. I made a comment to someone recently that success isn’t a linear path. At least it isn’t for most. Like life it twists and turns, there may be periods where you double back and the destination that you thought was fixed, isn’t.
You could say that failure has never been so popular. Admitting our own has become a sign of emotional maturity and listening to the experience of the well-known has become entertainment. I like millions of others tune in (if that’s what we do with podcasts) to Elizabeth Day's, How to Fail. Essential listening. It perhaps goes hand in hand with that other emotional boom: vulnerability. Cheers Brené Brown. I’m all for it.
Through school the fear or threat of failure was constantly reinforced. I remember clearly as a primary school kid, of maybe nine years old, a teacher telling me that if my behaviour continued as it was, I would fail my exams. Those exams were about six years away. She compounded the threat with, “and you won’t get a job.” Strange how I can still remember that so clearly, and it’s just one such moment of many. At around fourteen, having told a careers advisor that I wanted to pursue a life in media I was told “it’s very competitive.” Essentially the advice was lower the bar for fear of failure.
Move forward twenty-something years later and I found myself late to the party, but here all the same. I wouldn't say I was obsessed, but I was driven to write for certain publications that would give my career credibility and serve as a calling card for bigger things. Lost time perhaps? Early on I'd written for The Guardian, and I’d seen the power of that byline. I still do. So, accruing more titles, is a no brainer. And while I’ve done that it’s not always gone to plan.
Noble Rot, you’ll probably know. If you don’t it’s a cult wine quarterly which has gone on to spawn bar-restaurants, the third of which is opening in London’s Mayfair, plus there’s bottle shop Shrine to the Vine. The incarnation on Lambs Conduit Street is close to my idea of perfection when it comes to wine bars. More on that another time. So, it was big for me to pitch and huge to get a yes.
That pitch, entitled Journey of a Wino was a personal piece of my path from “beer obsessive to novice wino.” Did you just shudder, or was that me? Having got a yes there was the realisation that I had to write it. Which I did several times. There were rewrites, and edits and moments of creative despair, and that’s before I submitted.
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