On Learning From Failure

Your weekly dose of tools and tips to write faster and grow your storytelling empire.

Happy Tuesday! 👋

Alright so the wheels came off a little last week.

It seems when your wife goes away for a work trip you can’t rely on the writing machine operating in the same way without the full team.

Go figure.

But it’s important to count the small wins, especially when the whole week feels like a failure:

• I still got one chapter out on time.

• I have four chapters reviewed by my all-nite express editor.

I learned some things too:

• I found a way to keep my review feedback next to my draft — to check things off as I edit. ☑️

• I now know it takes me 90 mins to edit a chapter and another 15-20 minutes or so to format, run through ProWritingAid and schedule.

• My first drafts are too rough, so I’ll use the checklist I made for my express editor to make these drafts better.

So let’s call this week a reboot. A mulligan or a do-over.

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The Weekly Reboot Experiment

🎯 Goal

• Edit four drafts by Friday (did one this morning!)

• Batch schedule all on Friday

🤔 Hypothesis

We learn more from batching the same thing in a short feedback loop.

🧪 Experiment

1. Review all drafts with Express Editor prompt. ☑️

2. Action feedback and complete each chapter’s edits.

3. Schedule all in a single batch on Friday (15mins * 4)

📓 Ideal Results

Two or more chapters scheduled this week to free up time for Lore posts.

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Three Tooltips

The best tools for authors and how to use them.

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1. I had an Affair

I must be honest though there’s nothing quite like it.
A fresh, exciting creative affair to revitalise a dip in a longer term project.

My novel has me in the saggy middle, it’s not doing as much as it did in the beginning to keep things exciting and fresh.

So… I uh… took a little break.

And I’d forgotten just how great it is to write flash fiction.

If you must know…

I cheated with the

Fictionistas

July Prompt.

And I don’t regret it one bit. 😉

2. Huberman’s Latest Episode

Unless you’ve been living under a digital rock, you know Andrew Huberman, the Stanford neuroscientist and podcast extraordinaire.

Here’s a great tool and a great explainer in one: How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset

In this episode, I discuss how to build and apply a growth mindset — the practice of self-rewarding and focusing on learning and skill development through effort — to improve learning and performance.

Mindset matters , and a growth mindset is essential for creatives building a sustainable career.

3. Humour Trumps Failure

My wife and I are rewatching Big Bang Theory, and loving the nostalgia and re-lived laughs.

This last episode also ties in with learning from failure, Sheldon’s dad remind us that we learn more from failure than from success.

It’s easy to get down on oneself for not winning. Easy to get disheartened and give up. But there’s still a whole half more to play. So keep playing.

Two Inspiring Quotes

One good turn of phrase deserves another.

A good prompt gets you off zero,
and doing is what matters, right Walt?

The way to get started
is to quit talking
and begin doing.

— Walt Disney

But never fear, your creativity is a muscle that grows
the more you test it, use it and throw weird things at it.

You can’t use up creativity
The more you use
The more you have.

— Maya Angelou

One Question

Have you failed recently - big or small - how’d you get back up again?

Everyone stumbles and we all learn tricks or methods to pick ourselves up again. There’s no one this planet who, when learning to walk, fell over the first time and said, “That’s it I’m done! I’m just gonna lie here forever.”

What are your tricks for picking yourself up again?

Thank you, Dear Reader

Keep trying. Keep failing. Keep learning.

Until next week

Zane

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