Fail Better
I won’t pretend to understand most (much!) of Beckett’s Nohow On, but there are two phrases in it that have stuck with me since the dizzying experience of reading those three slim volumes. The opening of the third movement “Worstward Ho”:
“On. Say On. Be said on. Somehow on. Til nohow on.”
Coupled with its famous closing:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
This extremely loose couplet is Beckett’s exhortation to the tune of “try, try again” or “outwrite the bastards” but with higher stakes than a good poem or story… Beckett is reminding us that to say and do– repeatedly– is to be and and it is imperative that we keep at it until there is nothing else.
I was reminded of this extremely loose couplet while reading “Quantity Breeds Creativity” at Lifehack. There are two obvious educational aspects here which sometimes get overlooked (particularly if you believe, as I do, that the creative process is one of the most important parts of learning):
First, creativity isn’t efficient. There has been a lot of focus in the past few years on network effects, collectives and connectives, learning community and collaboration, much of which has explicitly or implicitly embraced a desire for efficiency. In my experience, creativity is most often fuzzy, vague, messy and characterized by a feeling of not really being sure what one is doing until they have done it. Creativity is driven by a variety of overlapping and sometimes partially opposing forces of experience, knowledge, and desire. In between making something great and making nothing lies a whole lot of making the mundane, mediocre, inessential, and irrelevant. Making something finally real– and thus being in the world– is harnessing the wisdom of the crowd of one… our multiplicitous self.
Second, creativity depends on repetition. This is really an extension of the lack of efficiency. We know from other aspects of our lives that where there is less efficiency there must be more effort to achieve the same goal. There’s a limited– but important!– amount that can be achieved by waiting for the intersection of the perfect moment and the muse. I’m not discounting the inspired stab in the dark, but most creative thought emerges from repetition, and most of that repetition will be, if not failure, something other than success. Flannery O’Connor once said that she wrote every day because who knew if a day she skipped might have been the day she would choose well?
I see ramifications of ignoring these two facts at work in the classroom all the time. As educators we try to find the most efficient way of teaching, the combination that– when right– will facilitate a particular learning process, frustrated when it doesn’t “work.” It’s not wrong, of course, to want to be efficient– we all have limited time and resources– but I wonder how often we go too far or simply hope for too much clarity in a process that is so individualized. Educators and learners alike often don’t put the tools, concepts, or techniques to work often enough and for long enough to really understand them. If lightning doesn’t strike immediately or consistently enough, promising and productive paths are abandoned.
There’s a bit of magic in the process where wholes become more than the sum of their parts and tools and creativity are melded. No matter how clearly and often I try to explain the value and nuance of blogging, for example, it must be engaged regularly and for a length of time before those lessons become real. It was the same with regular paper journals before and it will be the same when we have cyborg monkey servants in the future. It isn’t luck that these proven models work for some but not for others, it is a product of practice (of the repetitious kind that leads to the Zen kind). To end with a sports analogy to complement the video, think of Arnold Palmer’s famous response to the accusation that a tough shot out of the rough he had just made was luck: “All I know,” Palmer answered, “is that the more I practice, the luckier I get.”
Tags: creativity, education, practice, teaching
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