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Amena: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Wake Up and Create. I am Amena Brown
from WABE and Creative Mornings Atlanta. We're sifting through our archives of
talks focused on creativity, art, and business to start your week off with some extra
motivation. Everyone you'll hear from was part of the Creative Mornings Atlanta Live
Speaker Series, which still happens for 10 inspiring events each year. Find all the
details on our next event at creativemornings.com/atl or visit the link in our show
notes.

Okay. Many of you that have been listening to our podcast know that I can be a
coffee girl in the morning. Whatever your beverage is, if it's coffee, straight, no
chaser, if you are more of a green tea, more of a hot tea, more of a matcha person,
whatever it is you like, grab a hold to that beverage. Did you get your breakfast right
this morning? I know. Sometimes you go there to make your eggs or maybe just
eggs for my vegans out there and your scramble went a little awry. Sometimes we
put the toast in, left the toast in a little too long. I know those vibes.

Listen, if that's you, today's episode might be just what you need to hear. Today
we're going to hear from Wade Thompson and Wade is talking about failure and its
role in getting him where he is today, a creative director. Let's listen.

Wade: We talk about it as if it's just some roadside sign on the way to success and it
doesn't feel right to me. Remember when we started talking about social media? Oh,
is your business doing social? Are you doing social? What's your social media
strategy? No one knew what to do, but they knew they had to have a Facebook page
or a MySpace page or something like that. It kind of feels hollow, just like a buzzword
right now, and I have a hard time relating to failure in that sense.

I think what I'm concerned about is the real failure that does affect us. It affects you
and me, and maybe it's like a plague to us creative folks. I want to be able to talk
about that a little bit, talk about a failure that has some meat and bone in it and that
we've all experienced. What do you say if someone crashes their bike and spills all
over the sidewalk? Oh, it's okay. Fail faster, because you're going to succeed sooner
or, hey, sorry, you lost your job. You got to fail to win. You don't say that, right? You
don't call your friends failures. You don't talk about things as failures. You say, oh
man, that's too bad, it didn't work out or tragedy struck.

We just don't use failure unless we're at a conference, a design conference, an

If things went my way, what I planned in college, I would be playing golf right now. I
would be at some insurance firm or be some salesman or do whatever people do in
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high-rise business offices. I wouldn't be right here but, thankfully, none of that
happened. I think when we try to control our idea of control and controlling
outcomes, really takes us to limited places. It limits what we're able to accomplish
and ultimately the joy in our lives.

I wrote down years ago, 10, 15 years, what would I settle for. I was at a point where I
was starting my career, just getting off the ground, and I was scared about the future,
so I started writing down, Okay. What would I settle for? What would I trade
everything for right now just to be safe? If I went back and looked at that, I would
have sold myself short so big. It was just the idea that, okay, if I can control and pick
my destiny, what would that be versus if I'm going to be open to what's actually going
to happen and all these other possibilities?

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Amena: Failure. Just what you wanted to talk about this morning, right? [laughs]
Failure is, unfortunately, and maybe fortunately, a part of the journey of being a
creative person. I've experienced myself as well as my other friends and other
communities that are doing creative things, that sometimes a moment that seems
like failure actually leads you down the road that you were supposed to go on all the
time. I have friends who are visual artists that make a mistake as they're trying to
make art and then they realize the mistake they made is actually better than the
thing that they had planned.

There are a lot of ways that failure will show up. I think the first thing we have to give
to ourselves in thinking about what Wade is sharing with us here is that failure is a
part of it. It's a part of us deciding to be creative. It's a part of us saying that we will
think a bit outside of the box, that we may push ourselves or the people we work with
or our clients or our art past convention. In order to do that, you have to be willing to
fail.

I was trying to think of other moments I had felt like failure or just were failure. I
thought about the sweatiest gig I ever had. I remember getting booked at a college in
the South. I think it was still that early summertime of school where school has first
started, but it's still pretty hot out. I remember that I got this gig that was supposed to
be this great experience. I was going to get to go there and talk to students who
were leaders on campus and of those leaders. However, the minute they thought
were going to show up, only about eight of them showed.

I was stuck in this hot box of a room, sweating, sweating, sweating. If there are
pictures anywhere of that gig, all that people will see is my sweaty armpits. I did the
best I could to share my story with the students, but I felt like a failure. I felt like,
yikes. I'm supposed to be here at this point in my career. For some reason, this
whole thing that they told me was going to be this certain thing, it's just me here
being really sweaty, talking to a room of eight students.

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One of my biggest moments that felt like failure at the time was not getting into grad
school. I know for many of us in our creative journeys, there are lots of conversations
and questions around what kind of training do we want to get, what type of education
do we want to have. I attended Spelman College. Shoutout to any of my Spelmanites
listening here. I attended Spelman College, and it was an amazing experience and a
very competitive one. I was going to school with these amazing Black women who
knew what they were talking about, knew what they were doing, had wonderful
ambitions, and were totally pursuing those.

As school was ending, I was, sort of, at that point as a creative that I knew what I
didn't want to do, but I wasn't all the way sure what I wanted to do, and what I
wanted to do didn't really have a prescribed path. There wasn't really a way at that
time that you could start right out of college and just start writing. I decided that I
would do what other people advised me, which was to go to grad school. I spent all
senior year applying to grad school while watching so many of my classmates
getting into these amazing grad schools all over the country. I'm not hearing anything
at first, and then I am starting to get some of this information back, but I'm starting to
get rejection letters. I'm getting rejection letter after rejection letter. By that time, I had
been writing poetry for a long time. I had been performing poetry for a long time.

To think that I was applying to get a master's of fine arts in poetry and not actually
get in was really disorienting is the only word I can think to describe it to you all. I
remember after realizing all the schools I applied to rejected me, that I didn't have a
plan B. I love what Wade is bringing up here for us is that sometimes what feels like
a failure at the moment may actually be taking us down a road that maybe we didn't
expect, maybe we weren't planning it, but it may be taking us down a road that we
were supposed to go down all the time. I didn't get into grad school, and I ended up
needing to work at Smoothie King for a while. I worked as an administrative assistant
for a while. I worked as a receptionist for a while.

A lot of my journey, like many of us in our creative lives and creative work, it was
kind of rough and tumble. It was a lot of things that I learned along the way and
things that I found I was good at, things I discovered I wasn't so good at. It is still
funny to me today to think that I was rejected by four grad schools for receiving a
master's in fine arts and poetry, but here I am all of these years later actually in a
career of being a poet.

I think what Wade brought to me and why I wanted to share some of those stories
with you all too is because I think when we fail, we don't often hear other people talk
about it. Yes, sometimes at that moment that you failed, you don't have the end of
your story, right? You don't have the foresight to be able to say, man, this sucks, but
that's okay. A few years from now, I'll be in a better place. When you're at the
moment where everything just crumbled, where things didn't go well in front of you,
that can be hard to look towards the future and say, oh, that's okay. I can do it. I can
make it past this.

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One thing I'll say first of all, that helps me is to say, if you're in a moment right now
where you're experiencing failure, sometimes you have to sit with it. You have to sit
with the feelings that that gives you. You have to sit in the place where you are.
Sometimes as you sit there, you may find your creativity starting to open up. Here
are some questions I want to throw out there that can maybe help you tackle how
failure affects you, whether it's in your work or in your personal life.

Think about these things. How can giving up a little bit of control change how you
think about failure? What have you learned from your past failures? Maybe for me, I
learned to wear extra deodorant when you know you're going to a gig that's going to
be hot and sweaty. How is your fear of failure holding you back? I'm going to throw
an extra one in there. How is a moment of failure holding you back?

That could be the truth, that failure is a moment, that you are not a failure, and that
because you experience a moment of failure doesn't mean that that is all of your
story. Think about that. Maybe get a little extra cup of coffee or cup of tea this
morning too. Sometimes that will help you to start re-imagining what your life can be
for now. This is Wake Up and Create. Thanks for listening. I'm Amena Brown.

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