Talent

Failing Fabulously

Posted at 09:38AM Sep 29, 2008 by Kerry Shaw in Talent Advice

I threw a disastrous dinner party last week—the chocolate mousse was terrible, the cheese plate melted when I left it on the oven, and I invited someone who I forgot was a total freak and he did Clay Aiken impressions the whole night!

I was bemoaning this to Zoey at Urth Caffe last weekend and she told me this useful tidbit: “If you are going to fail,” she whispered, “fail fantastically.”

Zoey’s point was that if you do something with gusto, then you are winning—not matter the outcome. And my dinner party wasn’t reeeeally a failure. My friends didn’t mind missing the mousse, the melted cheese tasted just fine, and everyone got tons of inside joke mileage from the Clay Aiken impersonator.

Case in point: many of the people who tried out for Zoey’s talent contest on Sugarloot were wonderful enough to win. Zoey was disappointed that she couldn’t fly them all out to Los Angeles, but it put a smile on her face to know that so many of her readers are so very talented.

What about you? Have you ever found the silver lining in something that didn’t turn out as you expected?

Comments[4]