Inspiration, Play, and Failure Bring Success

To me, the most critical elements of success are inspiration, play, and failure. Not drive, not ambition, not an insane list of unachievable goals. Just inspiration, play, and failure. We are not efficient machines. We are humans. We have good days and bad days, productive ones, and unproductive ones. Pushing too hard, making unachievable goals, and constant drive without built-in rest will kill success quicker than anything else I know. And when you hit burnout, it’s relaxation and play that will make things right again, giving inspiration a chance to return. When we “work” we refer to the adult drudgery of duty and obligation, usually for money. But it’s play that will help us discover, experiment, learn, and progress.

Think about it: when a child experiments and learns, it’s called play. And it’s play that leads to discovery, inspiration, and those remarkable “aha” moments that lead to success. When children play, they learn about the world they live in. They learn about everything around them. They learn about relationships that not only include people, but they also learn about form, balance, design, space and proportion, light, dark and color and so much more. They are experiencing, and therefore, there is no failure, and they create and achieve at their level. They are wildly creative, uninhibited and the world is a canvas on which to paint their experiences.

As adults, we have been lead to believe that play is reserved for children. Adults rarely even refer to “play” except in association with children’s behavior. Play, then, by inference, is childish. Work has replaced play for adults. Therefore, if work is not “success,” it’s “failure.” Note how these two words are directly associated with “work” but not “play.” I think this is a perfect example of a very bad perception which society has created and embraced.

I taught piano lessons for over two decades. I taught many ages, including several adults. The students who had the most difficult time finding any joy at the piano were teenagers and adults who were driven to succeed, and could not tolerate making any kind of mistake (which they believed was failure). I remember one particular student who often arrived with furrowed brow, who tormented the piano. However, she would play perfectly many times, despite her harsh style. But even then her performance was mechanical and somewhat lifeless. She played ferociously no matter what the mood of the piece was. She finally admitted her fear of failing to please me which made her so tense that her muscles would only allow her to play as if she were attacking the keyboard. Finally, it dawned on me what to say to her:

“Thank you for working the piano. But we call it playing the piano for a reason. Please don’t work the piano. Please play it.”

I asked her to close her eyes and see herself playing this beautiful piece she chose, removing me from that picture altogether. After a minute or two, she opened her eyes and began playing. She was utterly amazed at the transformation of music she created. It came alive to her! The missing puzzle piece in her music was the rediscovery of play. The piano sang with emotion and feeling. Even when her playing wasn’t perfect, none of the beauty of her performance was minimized. Fear of failure was eliminated.

Play restored her joy. Failure no longer existed for her because she was playing. The stress of performing disappeared.

Did you know it’s actually failure that we need most (despite that we think we need success the most)? We fear and despise failure. We think it makes us look bad. Think about that last sentence. We don’t want to look bad because it’s embarrassing and we don’t want to feel or appear to be incapable. But that idea is always rooted in our insecurities. It’s because 
of or insecurities that we believe that “failure” is negative. In truth, even if we do fail, every failure is a lesson, a furthering of our education, a course correction pointing us back to inspiration with a modified outlook and a slight change in direction. That slight change of direction is the revolution in your life that both frightens and exhilarates you. Embrace it.