Hang In!

I’ve definitely had days like this (especially when I’m trying to finish a book!), but one thing I’ve learned is that whenever I want to give up on something, when I try just a little bit harder, that’s when all the good things happen. So whatever is or isn’t happening in your life right now, hang in!

I talk about this in Life Glows On:

Excerpted from Life Glows On
Copyright © 2021 Claire Cook. All rights reserved.

How do we know when it’s time to give up? 

If we quit midway, it doesn’t feel good. It feels like failure. And that failure might be small and insignificant in the scheme of things, but it has a tendency to trigger memories of all the other things we’ve started and not finished. It can tear a surprisingly big hole in our self-esteem. 

So hang in. Take it day by day. Finish what you set out to do. You’ll learn so much from the experience, about your creativity and about yourself. Even if you didn’t love it after all, it will help you choose your next creative thing. And when you finally find that creative click, you’ll recognize it and appreciate it all the more.

But what about those bigger, long-term, pie-in-the-sky goals? The destinations that our headlights can’t see in the fog, the ones we dream about as we toss and turn at night? Not our very achievable one creative thing, but the huge, go-for-it goal we’re hoping is waiting at the end of the long and treacherous road. 

We’ve been painting and painting, but every art competition we submit our work to turns us down. We’ve been working so hard on our memoir, but not a single literary agent we’ve pitched has even asked to read it.

How do we know when we’re simply frittering our lives away on these dreams? How can we tell if we should just let them go and move on? 

What I see over and over again are people who just didn’t hang in there long enough. A couple of waves knock them over, and instead of getting up again and brushing off the sand and positioning themselves for the next wave, they pick up their surfboard and go home. Or they let an imaginary rip current take them way out to sea. And then, after going through all that, when they finally swim the whole way back to shore, instead of reassessing and using all that hard-earned knowledge to take the next step, they jump to another project.

I get it. Failure is awful. It’s demoralizing. It’s embarrassing. But here’s the truth. Everybody fails. And if you try to keep your life really small and unassuming to avoid failing, you’re still going to fail. You’ll just have smaller failures, and you’re going to miss a whole bunch of growth and satisfaction. So you might as well go for what you really want.

“If what you’re doing is significant,” I say in Never Too Late, “of course you’re going to fail. In fact, if you can’t remember the last time you failed at anything, you might want to step it up a little. You might be playing it way too safe and easy.” 

Failure can really take us by surprise. It catches me every time. I don’t know if my setpoint is to be naturally optimistic, or if I’m just really good at denial, but I’m always at least a little bit shocked when something doesn’t work out the way I imagined it. It’s no fun.

It doesn’t help that we’re so used to looking through the lens of social media, where everybody’s curated lives appear so perfect. Sure, there are plenty of people who overshare every single thing that goes wrong in their lives on Facebook. You have to avert your eyes fast so you don’t have to see that photo of their post-surgery stitches or itchy rash or bony bunion. So you don’t have to read their post about the nasty thing the person at that store said to them or how they just got fired or dumped by a boyfriend.

But lots of us, and I have to admit that I’m one of them, have a tendency to only tell the good stories. I think, for me, it’s not that I’m trying to make my life look perfect. It just feels that focusing on the positive becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and brings more good things into my life, while focusing on the negative would probably send lots of negative vibes my way.

So I tend to gloss over the bad and celebrate the good. But trust me, it’s not all good stuff.

There are lots of versions of the saying don’t quit before the miracle floating around right now. But the sentiment has been around for a long time. Even Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Think about that. What if you quit today and your big dream could have happened tomorrow, or next week, or next year? And you’ll never know.

It’s what we do after our inevitable failures that matters most. We can consciously flip those failures into fuel and use that energy to drive us forward. Personally, as soon as I hit a dead end, I let myself whine and wallow and get all pathetic and feel ridiculously sorry for myself. I used to give myself twenty-four hours, but I’ve failed enough by now that I’ve streamlined the process down to a few hours. After that, even I’m sick of my dramatics. 

And then I ask: What else is possible? What’s my next step? 

Because if we want to get where we’re going, it’s all about tenacity. Failure is just a stepping stone. It teaches us what to do differently to get to the next stepping stone. It makes us resilient and helps us fine-tune our focus. 

Failure makes us more creative, because it forces us to find a new approach, another way of going forward. It makes us learn more, be better. 

We all know the stories. Harry Potter was rejected dozens of times. Gone with the Wind was supposedly rejected thirty-eight times, The Dubliners twenty-two times, A Wrinkle in Time twenty-nine times.  

Film executives told Harrison Ford he didn’t have what it took to be a star. Meryl Streep was told that she wasn’t pretty enough. 

One of Oprah’s early producers told her she was “unfit for television.” What if Oprah had believed that producer?

The Help received sixty rejections from literary agents. What if Kathryn Stockett had quit at ten or twenty, and not hung in there and written query letter number sixty-one?

If you look carefully at a successful person, you see someone who wants things enough to keep going back in again and again. She’s not necessarily more talented than everybody else, but she’s definitely more determined. She pivots, sharpens her skills, finds another angle, reimagines, reinvents, reconnects, resets, restarts, refocuses, readjusts as many times as she needs to. And most of all, she keeps moving forward.

Vera Wang almost qualified for the Olympic figure skating team in 1968. That failure led her to reinvent her career and she became a fashion editor at Vogue three years later. When she was denied the editor-in-chief position, that failure gave her the drive to start her own fashion chain. At first glance, it might seem like a random path, but each of those steps are connected in unexpected, creative ways. Each failure was a step in figuring out who she was and refining her dream.

For each of us, I think there’s a sweet spot between what we have to offer the world and what the world is looking for. We just have to hang in there until we find it.

Even if your one creative thing is something you have more control over, maybe to write a children’s book as a surprise gift for your grandchild, you’re still going to fail along the way. Some aspect of it will turn out to be harder than you thought it was going to be. You’ll have everything uploaded to the photo site, and you’ll get a message that your pictures aren’t high resolution enough, and you don’t even know what the term high resolution means. Or you can’t figure out how to get the text to align the way you want it to in the text boxes, and you have no idea how to figure it out because you’re not even close to being computer literate. 

Not only does it feel like the project is a failure, it feels like you’re a failure. You’re over your head, it’s never going to work, what a stupid idea this was.  

Take some time to feel sorry for yourself if it helps. Then figure out your next step. You could hire someone to do the whole thing for you. Or you could ask the grandchild you’re making the book for to help you, although I guess that kind of does away with the surprise element. 

But you’re going to feel so much better if you use this roadblock as an opportunity to figure it out yourself. You’ll grow. You’ll add tools to your toolbox. You’ll be so proud of yourself. 

Just take it one step at a time. Start with the search bar at the photo site. Type in tutorials. Or photos. Or text. If you can’t find what you need, start Googling. You don’t have to fully understand everything about creating picture books on a photo site. You just have to figure out the things you need for the book you’re making. 

As the old cliché goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Fail. Regroup. Correct. Move on.

I spend a huge chunk of my life doing this kind of thing, and I can confidently assure you that there is a YouTube tutorial that will take you step by step through just about everything you need to know. Watch the first step. Pause the video and do that step. Watch the second step. Pause the video and do it. 

Take it from me, you can accomplish just about anything in the world like this. We live in a time of unlimited resources, and the information to turn your failure into a next step is always available, often for free.

If you haven’t read Life Glows On yet, I hope you will!

xxxxxClaire

CLAIRE COOK wrote her first book in her minivan at 45. At 50, she walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of Must Love Dogs, starring Diane Lane and John Cusack, which is now a 7-book series. Claire is the New York Times, USA Today and #1 Amazon bestseller of 21 books, including her latest, LIFE GLOWS ON: Reconnecting With Your Creativity to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life.