We Never Remember the Crap Versions
Pixar is proud of the fact that it sucks. In order to serve the quality of storytelling, the company responsible for The Incredibles, Cars, Toy Story, Brave, and other brilliant work has established a working order of: make something, tear it apart, make it better.Craig Good, an original Pixar employee and 31 year veteran, wrote, “Pixar’s movies all suck, and it knows it. At some point in production, every single Pixar film sucks. The trick is not stopping there. Very few studios are willing to hit the brakes on a production and idle several hundred extremely expensive artists while story problems get worked out. Pixar has done this multiple times.”The thing is, we are self-destructively unaware that everything has sucked. Every Harry Potter book, every book you’ve ever read sucked. Every performance, every famous painting, every company, every idea, but the creators didn’t stop there. Leonardo DaVinci crumpled up paper and threw it in the trash. Cake fail shows are hilarious, but if the baker tried a bunch more, they’d eventually make a nice one.We don’t recognize the failures, for a lot of reasons. For one, nobody likes talking about failure. For another, because memory is selective, and because children are largely shielded from much of the bad parts of the world, so everything feels like it used to be better. And we’re all vulnerable to a “things these days” mood as we get older, but if you read history, you can find Cicero complaining about kids screwing up the Roman Empire, or someone tearing down the original millennials, and how they ruined France with all their Viking raiding.
In the end, a lot of failures aren’t even failures, but simply pivots and changes, which is why we didn’t see how much the beginning stank. So stop calling what you’ve created—including yourself—a failure. Stop worrying that it might be. Because failure and success are the exact same thing. The only difference is stopping or continuing. If being garbage is good enough for Pixar, then it’s good enough for us all.