Taped to the music stand in my practice room is this poem by Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989), an Irish playwright, novelist, poet and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, who wrote:
“Ever Tried.
Ever Failed.
No matter.
Try Again.
Fail Again.
Fail Better.”This poem is so simple, but for me it is the key to the hidden kingdom. This is how learning music has to work for me. My improvement in the early stages was slow and steady, but soon it wasn’t and progress continues to be unpredictable. Things go well and then they don’t for reasons that defy my analysis. “I could do this yesterday, but can’t today when I am giving it my best effort…over and over. Why does this happen? How do I fix this.” Are obstacle like these unique to me? Once I absorbed this poem, things have gone better.
Beckett’s poem is a corollary of “Perfect is the Enemy of Good.” (Perhaps Voltaire?) I now try to recalibrate my self-assessments as to whether I have “failed better,” not to how am I doing compared to Jean Paul Rampal. “Failing Better” nourishes motivation. To become proficient at something that isn’t easy requires a solid belief that improvement, not perfection, is within reach. To retain the motivation to practice conscientiously, I need proof that my faith in improving isn’t a hollow hope.
Small triumphs automatically generate little ego strokes. These tiny internal “pats-on-the-back” briefly override the incessant negative appraisals that dwell deep in my subconscious. Monkey-mind runs rampant in the hallways of my mind. Monkey mind thrives on every failure and setback and is a motivational slayer. Learning demands that monkey-mind get muzzled, at least a bit, in every practice session.
Beckett’s insight revealed a path for me to take to make music when I was floundering and couldn’t find one. I am learning music by learning how to embrace, “Fail Better.”
I love that Beckett sits with you when you practice, along with Molly. Very familiar thoughts, re how the work of creating is in many ways the work of ignoring or overlooking or not minding or even embracing that one is ALWAYS falling short of the vision we have of what we'd like to be doing and what we want the product of our efforts to look -- or sound -- like. For me it helps to zero in on the practice itself -- despite or maybe because it is full of imperfection, failure, stops and starts, failing and failing again. That's really what we have and what we get -- it's the actual thing about making art that is available and real every day. So we have to love the process, which is messy and convoluted and uncontrollable. The failure IS the art and the art is IN the failure, for each of us in our own way. My line is from Mary Oliver: "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Better to create and struggle with it than not to create at all, by far. Just showing up is tremendous success.
Fabulous post. Every "failure" is a potential learning experience; in fact, we "learn" anything by failing and continually adapting. Monkey mind thrives by interpreting every failure as proof of inadequacy, but this is where determination comes in to keep adapting and improving. "Success" rarely arrives overnight, but is the product of thousands — even millions — of incremental adaptations.