By Roman Lapacz

Failing better

Among all the great lessons we are taught at the SCA, one of the most valuable is how to embrace failure.
Even if we try our best on each brief to avoid any mistakes, there is always something wrong. And that’s the best part.
Because whether it’s just a small detail or the whole project, it’s another lesson we are learning.

Yep, we should all be craving for mistakes.
They are not dead ends, but tools you can use to become better.
If you take the time to analyse them, you will make sure it won’t happen again.

Now let’s apply that to my latest failure: the WWF entry I did with Nihal for D&AD.

After the results were announced, I started watching every winners videos.
And I instantly understood why ours didn’t get through.
Every each one of the short listed ideas can be explained in a sentence.
Not ours.
Even after having spent hours working on it, I still can’t figure out a way of explaining it in a few words. So how was the jury supposed to get it?

Even if we started with a good idea, I think we somehow lost our focus, we tried to had new things to fit all the holes and ended up losing it’s simplicity.

And that’s a mistake I’m not gonna make again.

Thanks to Ben Priest’s awesome masterclass, I realised that the only way you can really fail at something is by not doing anything. The more you create, the more mistakes you will make, but if you are able to use each one of them, nothing can really stop you anymore.

If your plan is to succeed at everything, you might be disappointed, because sometimes it’s not even up to you, and you will never have the chance to get better.
So be glad to fail, don’t let it turn your moral down, after all, everything is a process, right?

In the end, we don’t build our careers on the briefs we cracked, but on the one we failed.