Nostalginaut

I got carried away.

Although my hand becomes ever unsteady, I decided to try painting the "Big Bads" of some games I enjoyed from years past.

I still don't know about this last one (Xagor). I don't think I have anything for lines this fine.

I was so nervous about starting a painting that I psyched myself out of starting last night after penciling.

"But the penciling already looks good by itself."

"My paints and brushes are so cheap, it's not gonna look good when it's done."

"My hands shake too much, I could never keep still enough to trace these fine lines."

"I'll probably get tired of looking at it, even when it IS done, and even if it DOES end up looking okay."

I haven't painted something from scratch since before I can remember (elementary school?), and I have no real idea what possessed me to start this weekend, but here I am, rolling with it, and drowning out my defeatist inner monologues with videogame OSTs.

I'm sure there's a lesson here about conquering perfectionism.

You see messages like this everywhere. Celebrity Instagrams (like Will Smith's "Fail forward" video). TED talks. Business startups and product launches and memoirs by successful public figures in every field from entertainment to engineering.

Unfortunately, it's become a strikingly-less-common philosophy in education - in a time and in places where many of our most important life lessons need to be coming from failures. Instead, though, it's a daily battle to wrestle points from a rubric after those failures are brought to light; it's a competition between kids to reach the top of the class when those achievements are reflective of a dated mindset and a misguided approach to higher education, success, and happiness in life.

The subtitle of this book, Press Reset, is "Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry," and it's really (so far) looking at ways that people and teams come together, struggle together, and fail together - then snatch their victories, big and small, from the jaws of defeat. It highlights the recovery as much as the ruin, and that's important - because ruin doesn't have to be utter or permanent.

Without it, though, you'll never really know otherwise. You can (and will) be told, but it's crucially something that's learned and internalized through experience.

These are the kinds of stories you hear in TED Talks, podcasts, and corny LinkedIn posts from any one of those hundreds of groups with "Leadership" and/or "Success" in the name (take your pick). They're discussed over lunch in the break room at work, get mentions in weekly feel-good newsletters, and they even squeak their way into professional development conferences worldwide that institutions spend more dollars on than I'm comfortable knowing (school districts in the US spend more than $18 billion a year according to this slightly-dated Education Next article).

Yet "failure," for all its necessity, is still somehow seen as one of the worst things a child can do. There's a great need to change this relationship with failure. It's what success is made from.