Success if Failure

Failure happens to everyone. What determines whether or not success is eventually achieved is the response to that failure. In branding, we designers encounter a great deal of failure when determining a logo and the overall graphical feel of a brand. Logos are constantly being rejected by clients and it often takes several different attempts before a well-designed logo emerges. Contrary to popular belief, failures can a designer better. In much the same, way failure can also make a brand better. With that in mind, here are a few ways to deal with failure and continue moving forward towards eventual success:
1. Focus on Moving Forward: Develop skills for error recovery, not failure avoidance. We all make mistakes. You cannot take a worthy risk if you are afraid to try anything challenging. Focus on moving forward in a slip up instead of depleting your energy worrying about it.

2. Embrace Ambiguity: Spend more time defining your problem and less time executing your solution. Ambiguity fosters guessing. Rushing to solutions without a clearly defined problem or substantial framework contributes to failure.

3. Prepare for Failure in the Beginning: Visualize potential road blocks and proactively look at risks and prepare to counteract or soften them. Caused of failure are the same from situation to situation: lack of communication, unrealistic outlooks, insufficient training, etc…We repeat these mistakes because we find it hard to imagine and react to abstractions.

4. Fail Better: No matter how good something appears it can always be better. Samuel Beckett said "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." So keep trying, you will get it right and it will be better.

5. Make a choice: If you have two opposing courses of action, pick one. Many people get stuck making choices out of fear of failure. Are we afraid of making the wrong choice? In essence, the choice you choose is essentially the right one. Every decision you make propels you forward toward something. The trick is adjusting trajectory when your choices deviate you.

6. Keep your drive with equal parts vision and task: Tell a story, be empathetic to those involved in a project, and stay connected to the big picture. If you do not realize your role or see how your tasks contribute to failure, you cannot learn and change. Vision is important for persistence through a project when different people are all working to tell the same story. Confused? Basically, evaluate what the team did right after a project is completed. Revisit the vision and examine how it fits the overall story.

Without failure, few great things are ever achieved. If used properly, failure should not be a hindrance but a springboard propelling a brand to greater heights. From failure, we learn where we can improve and what to do differently in the future. When building a brand, embrace failure and respond to it by bettering yourself and those around; you might just be surprised at how successful you become.