Be Creative around Failures

Just before writing this blog post, I was drinking coffee ☕️and I spilled some on my shirt, thus staining it.

Talking about a stained shirt reminds me of Massimo Bottura (Chef patron of Osteria Francescana, a three-Michelin-star restaurant) 🥗. One of Massimo’s employees dropped a dish and stained an expensive carpet. Neither did he scold him nor did he talk about a pay cut. Instead, he created a new dish called Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart. This is an example of being impossibly creative around failure. 

When the paint department of Walmart found that it did not have the product to satisfy its customers, it got really jittery. Number one Superstore failing to satisfy its customers! Walmart got really creative around this failure. It started recommending its rivals. This way, Walmart created an impression that it was ready to genuinely stretch itself to fulfill the needs of its loyal customer base. The move heightened Walmart’s stature in its customers’ eyes. 

Oscars rained on Apocalypse Now but we hardly get to know that Marlon Brando walked into the set 300 pounds heavy and that Martin Sheen had a heart attack on the set and the whole crew used to be high on narcotics, any hour of the day. 

We appreciate a great book 📖, a classic movie 🎬 , or an intelligent design. What is common to them? It is that they are all finished products. We enjoy watching Finding Nemo (at times, our jaws drop!) without ever imagining that in the draft stage, there were about 125,000 sketches, and most of them sucked. 

Only by being creative around failure can we get a Jackson Pollock- 360-degree- view of it. Pollock was the first guy to paint on the floor. This way, he could move around his painting 🤹, thereby gaining a 360-degree perspective. 

Sometimes, for all we know, success may lie merely one degree beyond our angle of visibility.  🧐