Failure Is the Teacher: Three Times It Changed My Career

I am driving home from Los Angeles, worse off than when I left. I bet the farm and lost. I am barely functioning, broken, depressed and in serious financial trouble. Isn’t show business glamorous? It turned out to be some of the best tuition I ever paid.

I have a rule I repeat to everyone I mentor and to myself: you never learn from success. Failure is the best teacher, trust me on that. Here are three times it taught me something success never could.

The Tuition Rule

Every failure charges tuition. You can pay it once and learn the lesson, or pay it forever by refusing to look at the bill. I call that the Tuition Rule. Here are my three bills.

Tuition #1: The move to Los Angeles

After the Jimmy years I tried to move to Los Angeles. I was under the delusion that I could get it all done within thirty days. I reached out to commercial houses and could not even get through the front door. The producers I met on trips with Jimmy never called back. On my last day in town, a production company that had seen my reel wanted to hire me as an editor. I told them I was leaving. They needed someone to start the next week. L.A. had punched me in the face on the way out.

What I learned: if you are going to move to Los Angeles, have at least a year of living expenses saved. When you start out, you work for free or cheap to get your foot in the door. That lesson is practical and boring, and I would not have it any other way.

The bigger lesson came after. A few months after I left the Jimmy project, I wrote in a journal that I had grand ideas and lacked the courage to proceed. I also wrote that if you ask a question long enough, the answer presents itself. Then came a year of selling comic books on eBay from a friend’s garage, until my credit cards ran out. The bankruptcy paperwork never got signed. A phone call and an editing job took its place. I tell that story in what making films taught me about trusting the universe.

Tuition #2: Red Princess Blues

In 2010 I spent $50,000 of my own savings on a short film called Red Princess Blues, with big sets, Oscar-nominated actors, fight sequences and visual effects. After the success of BROKEN, my ego could not repeat what worked. I had to do something revolutionary, so I built a phone app. It took four months and $850, and I sold about 150 copies at $2.99. That is roughly $400 after Apple took its share.

“You never learn from success. Failure is the best teacher, trust me on that.”

The failure was my fault. I did not research what the market wanted. I did not study the competition. I did not run the return on investment. I overestimated how much people wanted my film. But the film played well on the festival circuit, led to a few high-profile directing gigs that more than paid for it, and became part of an online course that still earns weekly. Failure saved the tuition by teaching me what to do next.

Tuition #3: The path I walked away from

I started down a path in 2005 and rejected it because of my ego. When I finally came back to it, doors swung open. I tell filmmakers that story because it hurts less when the lost time is someone else’s.

What the three have in common

• Ego picks the plan. Each time I decided what the world needed without asking.
• Reality sends the bill. The money, the app sales and the missing years were all invoices.
• The lesson outlasts the loss. I am still using the Los Angeles, Red Princess Blues and ego lessons today.

Lesson and next step

Failure is tuition. Pay it once. If your ego is the one writing the checks, read what I learned about ego in filmmaking, and see what I lost on my first feature and how I learned to trust the universe. The whole story is in Shooting for the Mob.