Creativity is created not from inspiration but from 'stacked failures'

BySon of Groucho

When I touch outstanding works of art or industrial products, I think that "What originally came from the inspiration of genius?", But there are numerous examples indicating "creation is created by failure" There is. Many failures are indispensable to produce high quality, and the idea of ​​"Permission to Fail" that attracts mistakes is necessary if you follow the quality is drawing attention.

Viewpoint: How creativity is helped by failure - BBC News
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A masterpiece written about how art is created "Art and Fear"The authors David Beils and Mr. Ted Orland write about interesting experiments with students majoring in art. Mr. Veils and colleagues split the students into two groups, roughly when they presented the challenges of pottery. One group told that "the evaluation of the work is done by the total weight of all the work we made" and the remaining group told that "only one work is submitted." In other words, it was divided into a group to be evaluated by the "amount" of the work and a group to be evaluated by "quality".


As a result of the experiment, the work which received the highest evaluation was created from the group which was told by the "quantity" to be evaluated. Furthermore, surprisingly, it seems that most of the works that received high evaluation from the viewpoint of beauty and creativity were created from a group that was told to evaluate by "quantity".

Students in the group who evaluate with "quantity" are making busy moves with hands while trial and error, while students in the group who evaluates with "quality" greatly expanded the image before making a work Although it seems that it worked on one point of this, it is said that the result of the work of the group who made the work made it was overwhelmingly high quality. In other words, "quantity produced quality".

An example of "quantity creates quality" "high quality is proportional to the number of failures" is enumerated and it is not limited to art work. Mr. James Dyson, who created "a vacuum cleaner that does not suck", seems to have not imagined the final product image from the very beginning when we started making a dual cyclone vacuum cleaner.


Mr. Dyson said that he made 5126 prototype failures by the time he thought about designing a dual cyclone vacuum cleaner different from the conventional vacuum cleaner. Mr. Dyson says, "People think that imagination is a mysterious process, we believe that innovative products are a kind of god-inspired product, but creativity can be improved In the end, creativity is how much we can learn from failure, "he says, expressing his own product development process.

An example that the number of failures determines success is also in the world of animation. Pixar's high-quality animation known for his huge hits such as "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo" tends to be thought to be produced by geniuses with high creativity, but in reality many of the failures Each piece is born by stacking. An animation movie of 90 minutes consists of about 12,000 storyboards, but the production team seems to create more than 12,500 storyboards that is ten times more than that before actually completing the work. The soul will stay in the work only through such an iterative process of "failing, making and failing," Picer's CEO Ed Cut Mar said.


Given the fact that such "many failures produce high quality", there is the idea of ​​"Dare to fail". In other words, examples where failed work changes to different achievements seem to be common in product development of IT companies such as Google and Apple, so they are not afraid of failure, rather promoting encouragement is effective as a means of improving quality is.

The idea that many are fictional about anecdotes about the discovery and creation by past great men as typified by the story "Newton discovered universal gravitation from falling apples". Given the fact that great achievements are born beyond the accumulation of countless failures, it is important for creating high quality that it is more resilient than "genius-based talent" and is "ready to fail" maybe.