How creativity is helped by failure

It's mentioned in the article, but I'll go ahead and second the recommendation to read Art & Fear. If you ever make anything of any sort, you'll probably get a lot out of it.

An interesting part that the article didn't discuss as much was how to distill all mistakes into the finished product. It's one thing to say artists who make 50 lbs of ceramic pots have a few good ones, but how often are those pieces presented as the best by the artist, or iterated on.

In other words, deciding which projects to continue pursuing and which should be scrapped entirely is non-trivial.

Related and recently posted to HN: "Designing for Productive Failure in Mathematical Problem Solving"

http://www.manukapur.com/wp40/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Cog... (PDF)

Interesting bit about the 'behind the scenes' view of Pixar and that they strongly emphasize that all their movies 'suck' initially. In my own experience nothing brings out creativity like constraints. The harsher the constraints the more creative the results.

> As Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E, put it: "My strategy has always been: be wrong as fast as we can... which basically means, we're gonna screw up, let's just admit that. Let's not be afraid of that. You can't get to adulthood before you go through puberty. I won't get it right the first time, but I will get it wrong really soon, really quickly."

> Stay hungry, _stay foolish_

It is funny, how smart people think alike ;)