How to Fail Successfully Finding Your Creative Potential Through Mistakes and Challenges

From Brandon Stosuy, cofounder of the Creative Independent, an interactive guide to navigating disappointments and finding happy accidents in a creative life, filled with advice from artists across disciplines.

The third in a series of three interactive guides to the practical and emotional sides of living a creative life, How to Fail Successfully tackles the inevitable challenges that come with making work and releasing it into the world. Whether you are confronting “failure” in the form of fear, imposter syndrome, or negative feedback, this book provides insights and exercises to help you reframe these vulnerabilities as vital components to your process. Working artists from all walks of life—such as musicians, authors, filmmakers, dancers, designers, and visual artists—offer their advice throughout the book, providing ample evidence that even the most accomplished among us deal with ongoing self-doubt.

Part memoir, part zine, part how-to, and part oral history, in How to Fail Successfully author and curator Brandon Stosuy taps into his own experiences and an incredible network of talent to provide diverse (and diverging) perspectives on how success and failure are intertwined. Taken as a stand-alone guide or the finale of a series (including Make Time for Creativity and Stay Inspired), this book provides the support you need to take creative risks and make work on your terms. The book also includes quotes by Jason Reynolds (YA author), Björk (musician), Matthew Day Jackson (visual artist), Josh Fadem (comedian), Hanif Abdurraqib (poet and author), Sasha Grey (actor and DJ), Sigrid Lauren (choreographer), and many more.

Brandon Stosuy is the cofounder and editor in chief at The Creative Independent, the cofounder of the annual Basilica SoundScape festival in Hudson, New York, the cofounder of Zone 6 Artist Management and Gallery, and has been a music curator at both the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and MoMA PS1 in New York City. In addition to Make Time for Creativity, Stay Inspired, and How to Fail Successfully, he is the author of two children’s books, Music Is . . . and We Are Music.