How many novels exist only as "I'm still outlining"?

How many startups live permanently in "stealth mode"?

How many paintings never get painted because the painter is waiting until they're good enough to not mess it up?

The obvious response is to tell these people that failure is fine, actually. Failure is how you learn. Fail fast, fail forward, fail better, fail with courage, fail like an artist, all the motivational poster slogans.

And this is all true, as far as it goes,

But I've started to think the whole framing is wrong. We've been so busy rehabilitating failure that we forgot to ask whether "failure" is even the right word for what's happening when you try something and it doesn't work.

I think it's closer to an experiment.

Even if that doesn't sound as dramatic, or perform as well on Linkedin.

The Scientist In The Lab

An actual working scientist has a hypothesis, they design a test, they run it, they observe what happens. Sometimes the results confirm their hypothesis. Sometimes they don't. When they don't, the scientist doesn't curl up in a ball and whisper "I have failed" into the void and then publish a screed on B2b sales. They write down what happened, update their model, and design another experiment.

The concept of failure itself doesn't actually apply. An experiment that produces unexpected results isn't a failed experiment; it's just... an experiment. It gave you information. Now you know something you didn't know before. Richard Feynman used to talk about the pleasure of finding things out, and notice: he didn't specify "finding out that your hypothesis was correct." Finding out that your hypothesis was wrong is still finding out.

Scientists are operating in the experiment frame, while most creative people are stuck in the performance frame. In the performance frame, you're being evaluated. Your work is a test, and you either pass or fail. Every painting is an exam. Every blog post is a referendum on your intelligence. Every song is a hurdle. Every startup is a trial where the verdict is either "worthy" or "fraud."

In the experiment frame, you're just trying stuff. You're just doing stuff. What happens if I mix these two genres? What happens if I price this product higher than competitors instead of lower? What happens if I write in second person for once? What happens if I vibe code Roam Research?

You're not betting your identity on the outcome.

You're poking reality to see what it does.

Play Is Underrated

There's a related concept here that I think gets neglected in all the discourse about deliberate practice and 10,000 hours and gritty determination.

Play.

Watch a kid learn to draw. They don't sit there grimacing with determination, forcing themselves through regimented exercises. They scribble. They try weird stuff. They draw a horse with seventeen legs just to see what that looks like. And somehow, through this apparently unserious process, they actually get better.

The Renaissance workshops were serious places of serious craft, and they were also full of people trying bizarre experiments. Vasari's Lives of the Artists describes painters mixing strange pigments, attempting techniques no one had tried, taking on subjects everyone said were impossible. Leonardo's notebooks are crammed with wild speculations, most of which went nowhere. He was playing at the edge of what was possible, and occasionally something stuck.

Why don't we talk about this more? Maybe because "play" sounds unserious, and we've decided that important pursuits need important-sounding approaches. You can't tell people you're playing with ideas. You have to tell them you're iterating on your strategic vision.

As barf-worthy as that sounds, we all buy into it.

Reframing

I wonder if we should just stop using the f-word entirely. Call them experiments. Call them studies, like the Old Masters did with their preparatory sketches. Call them iterations, hypotheses, attempts, feints.

In the failure frame, you're asking "did this work?" In the experiment frame, you're asking "what did I learn?" The first question has a binary answer and most of those answers will make you feel bad. The second question always has an interesting answer, even when the experiment produced results you didn't want.

The fear that stops people from making things is almost entirely the fear of the performance frame. Nobody is afraid to experiment. We’re afraid to be judged. And the trick is to stop thinking of yourself as someone performing a skill and start thinking of yourself as a scientist in a lab, running tests, gathering data, slowly building up a picture of what works and what doesn’t. The scientist isn’t brave for continuing after unexpected results. They’re just doing science. That’s what science is.

Try things. Make things. Share what you learn. Treat your craft like a laboratory instead of an exam room. When something doesn’t work, find out why, write it down and try something else. No postmortems required, no elaborate analysis of what went wrong with your character. Just another piece of information, another small step toward understanding your craft.

The experiments that teach you the most are usually the ones you were afraid to run.