On Failure

"Fail early, fail often, fail forward.... It's always a little bit frustrating to me when people have a negative relationship with failure. Failure is a massive part of being able to be successful. You have to get comfortable with failure. You have to actually seek failure. Failure is where all the lessons are. You know, when you go to the gym and you work out, you're actually seeking failure, you want to take your muscles to the point where you get to failure because that's where the adaptation is, that's where the growth is. Successful people fail a lot. They fail a whole lot more than they succeed, but they extract the lessons from the failure, and they use the energy, and they use the wisdom, to come around to the next phase of success. You gotta take a shot. You have to live at the edge of your capabilities. You gotta live where you're almost certain you're gonna fail. That's the reason for practice, practice is controlled failure.... Failure helps you recognize the areas where you need to evolve. So fail early, fail often, fail forward."
     — Will Smith

"As much as anything, the trajectory of (Francis Ford) Coppola’s career has been determined by failure. I won’t go too deeply into his 1982 film, One from the Heart, other than to say it was a musical released in the age of punk, a love story released in the age of cynicism. In it, Coppola tried to capture the magic of theater, his first love. It’s not reality you expect from theater. It’s something else, something better. Another world. Artificial. Houses of marzipan. Colors too bright, lines too sharp. You look into it as you look into a jewel box. But people did not want lyricism in the early 1980s. They wanted grit. What’s more, Coppola had seemingly learned the wrong lessons from his experience. As the producer of American Graffiti, he had wanted to fund the thing and own it outright but was dissuaded. It went on to become one of the great moneymakers. Then Apocalypse Now, which had been written off by critics, was a great success. Which is partly why F.F.C. put his own money up for One from the Heart and then persisted through all the criticism from industry types. He was over-extended by the time it flopped, having borrowed millions from Chase Manhattan Bank. 'It was this dismal failure and I was on the hook for all of it,' he told me. 'I was going into bankruptcy, and everyone took such glee because they’re always predicting this profound failure, which was supposed to be Apocalypse. Apocalypse dodged the bullet somehow, so, when I made One from the Heart, it was like giving your opponent in Ping-Pong the perfect ball to smash. I was wiped out and only able to hang on by making a deal with Chase to pay off $22 million in 10 years. That meant I had to do a movie every year, and it changed my life. All those movies, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Outsiders, Dracula, and ultimately Godfather III, was me paying off the Chase Manhattan Bank.'"
     — Rich Cohen, Vanity Fair

"I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid to fall over and make a mistake. That often cripples people at the onset of getting into anything. The first time I picked up a DJ decks I was horrible, still am, but I'm not afraid of that, I'm not afraid of that feeling. It actually propels me and works quite the opposite."
     — Idris Elba, actor, producer, musician, DJ