If at First...

 

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

 Samuel Beckett

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Then he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success.

He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and in the senatorial election of 1858.

Winston Churchill failed sixth grade. He was subsequently defeated in every election for public office until he became Prime Minister at the age of 62. He later wrote, "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up." 

Sigmund Freud was booed from the podium when he first presented his ideas to the scientific community of Europe. He returned to his office and kept on writing.

Robert Sternberg got a C in his first college introductory-psychology class. His teacher commented that "There was a famous Sternberg in psychology and it was obvious there would not be another." Three years later Sternberg graduated with honors from Stanford University with exceptional distinction in psychology.. In 2002 he became President of the American Psychological Association.

Charles Darwin gave up a medical career and was told by his father, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat catching." In his autobiography, Darwin wrote, "I was considered by all my masters and my father, a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect."

Thomas Edison's teachers said he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first two jobs for being non-productive. As an inventor, he made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."
Confucius

An Awfully Chocolate Success Story & A Dream Come True

Here’s a story that will warm the cockles of your chocolate-loving heart and have you lunging for that bar you were saving for the moment when everybody else has gone to bed so you wouldn’t have to share it.

Lyn Lee was a lawyer living in Singapore in the late 1990s, stuck in a 9-5 treadmill of a job that brought a salary in and kept her safe in many ways but didn’t suit her temperament or her lust for life. Cue in a big percentage of the human race here, lawyer or not “Hey, that’s just like me.” And don’t forget all the people who slave at jobs that don’t pay enough to keep them safe, who are also caught in the same dilemma. And who don’t know how to get out of it. From personal experience I know that when you feel trapped it’s easy to believe that if you can’t do something to immediately change your circumstances you might as well do nothing at all.

Here’s where Lyn and a group of like-minded friends did something different. They got together regularly to bounce ideas around of something else they could do with their lives. They didn’t come up with anything but they didn’t stop. So what was the point? The point was, they left the door open.

At the same time this was going on, Lyn was kind of obsessed with finding a dark chocolate cake that had no synthetic flavor and that she could consume without feeling sick afterwards. She trawled Singapore looking for one with no success. She couldn’t believe it. Such a cosmopolitan city and not one single perfect dark chocolate cake?

Hey, why not make one and sell it! It was just a joke at first. When you hear people talk these days about going into business, it’s all about business plans and market research and facts and figures—dry, dead serious. Dead boring. Lyn wasn’t interested in any of that. She and her friends started playing around with recipes, making cake after cake—and eating it! They weren’t even really that serious. From successful but disgruntled lawyer to baker and purveyor of one type of chocolate cake? Ridiculous!

But they kept at it, and messed around in the kitchen for a year, making up recipes. Nothing too scientific, just having fun. Eventually they got it right. The dark chocolate cake that sent them to heaven and didn’t make them feel sick afterwards.

It was still a dumb idea. How can you open a cake shop with only one cake? What if nobody wants it and you’ve got nothing else to offer them? There was nothing sensible about the idea.

Lyn did it anyway. Full of enthusiasm and determination—and  passion for her perfect cake—she opened a shop in 1998 and called it Awfully Chocolate. Her family supported her but nobody expected her to succeed. Yeah, we all know that kind of support. Setting up shop in Singapore was hard; rents were high, competition fierce, businesses came and went at an alarming rate. Lyn was told she was naïve, that she couldn’t just sell what she wanted, it would never work. She had to figure out what other people wanted because that’s what business is about.

Yada yada. Her whole approach was un-businesslike. Everybody believed she was doomed to failure. Three months max they gave her.

They were wrong. For a start Lyn didn’t have any competition at all! And it seems she hadn’t been the only one looking for that perfect dark chocolate cake. Within three months business was booming. And that first shop was just a very unglamorous box. Lyn didn’t advertise, either. In 2004 she opened her second shop. Awfully Chocolate is still thriving and now has franchises in Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Gangzhou, Hangzhou, Nantong and Wuhan. With two products. Chocolate cake and Chocolate ice-cream.

It also has two offshoots now: Nine Thirty by Awfully Chocolate, a restaurant and dessert bar, and Everything With Fries, a cafe.

Lyn Lee broke all the rules, not out of mindless rebellion or stubbornness, but because they didn’t appeal to her and they didn’t make sense. She had a decent career but she needed something more in her life and she listened to her heart. She took it seriously enough to get together with friends and talk about it. Then she had fun with an idea.

Then she did the difficult thing. She flew in the face of everybody’s sensible opinions, established wisdom and well-documented tenets of how to establish a new business. Yet Awfully Chocolate succeeded where high profile, heavily funded shops with sophisticated marketing sometimes fail. Encouraging stuff. But perhaps the most inspiring part of all of this for me is that money and greed were never Lyn’s primary focus and they still aren’t.

“Our philosophy is simple & unique. The focus is not variety but quality. Our product line is deliberately limited—even today. We don't advertise (if we have to pay to say we're good, we're not that good). And we don't hard sell. We let you discover Awfully Chocolate your own way.”

Boiled Frogs and Original Sin

Is it an urban myth/metaphor or a reality? That if you stick a frog in a pot of water and heat the water gradually the frog’s capacity to adapt will be its downfall. Not realizing it’s in danger, it will be boiled to death. Leaving aside the gruesome possibility of this ever having been a real life experiment, it’s not a bad metaphor for adult behaviour. We get stuck in a comfort zone that starts out looking and feeling just fine, and keeps us materially provided for. It requires a whole lot of compromises but they seem small at first and perfectly manageable.  

Some part of us is in protest but we don't hear it. Or if we do, there’s always the future. I’ll just do this for a while then I’ll change and do something really worthwhile. 

The days, weeks, months and years pass. At some level the compromises become increasingly painful and unbearable but instead of listening to the pain and taking it seriously, we say things like It’s not so bad. I shouldn’t complain. I can’t complain. I should be grateful. Don’t worry be happy. Be positive. We feel quite heroic when we do that. Responsible. Accountable. Unselfish. Healthy members of society. 

Healthy? I'm not so sure. Afraid, maybe. Still so controlled by an atavistic fear of having no food and shelter that we can't embrace that our survival requires more than that now. It requires nurturing the heart and soul.  

Growing up Catholic, I rebelled strongly against the idea of original sin. Nobody could explain in any way that sounded remotely intelligent to me. I've come to see that probably our capacity to not listen to the most important part of us is what it's about if you strip it of the moralism. Sin is an archery term, meaning to miss the mark. Original sin is our capacity to miss the mark – which is pretty much what languishing in a comfort zone that doesn’t feed your heart and soul and mind in a balanced way is. Alongside judging those who are least trying to not die the slow crucifying death.

I can’t imagine that boiling frogs was ever a real experiment. Even if some psychopath did decide it would further the understanding of human nature, they would have had to slow-boil hundreds of thousands of frogs to be able to reach any kind of significant conclusion, since one frog doesn’t equal every frog. Just as in a tank of fish the majority will swim round and round in the same direction but a few will swim in the opposite direction, it’s probable that most frogs would boil to death but some would leap out as soon as the water started getting warm.

I doubt there’s a human being who wouldn’t look at those few and believe they were at the forefront of frog-evolution. But when people behave in the same ways as those clever, evolved frogs would if the experiment really happened, our reactions aren’t so simple. 

Some humans are a whole lot more finely tuned than others. They feel what’s happening within themselves, they see what’s happening in others. They register emotions and discomfort far more quickly than many others do. A whole world is visible to them that others are oblivious to. The kind of compromise that others will feel comfortable with for a while - and regret most horribly later on - is like torture to them immediately. They instinctively understand the danger. They make different choices in life which we often see as risky. But that’s only if we don’t see what they’re protecting. If we don’t see that they’re like those frogs that jump when the water is just getting warm. We don’t even consider whether in fact they’re taking less of a risk than we are. 

If they find a way to be materially safe in the world and even materially wealthy, we make heroes out of them. We look up to them as leading the way, following their heart, inspiring us. We write books and make movies about them; we make them our role models and aspire to be just like them. Or we tell ourselves we’d like to. We hold on at least to the fact that it is a humanly possible thing to follow your heart and succeed. We hold onto that light in our darkest hour.

What if they don’t do so well? Do we still recognize that at least they’re following their heart, or trying to? Do we look to them for inspiration?

It’s a rhetorical question. We’re more likely to criticize them for being irresponsible, selfish, freeloaders. We turn our backs on them; judge them for not being more like us, for not being willing to make the sacrifices we make. We do it especially if we’re slowly boiling away in boiling frogland. Even more especially if we don’t have the courage and honesty to acknowledge it.  

Or else if we help them we do it believing ourselves to be the heroes. We seldom let them forget how magnanimous we are and how much they're in our debt. Whatever we do with it, we hold onto the idea that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. We're at the forefront of evolution and they're trailing behind us. Even though our choices are eroding our lives faster than the speed of light. Yet imagine if we recognized that in many ways they’re ahead of us. Imagine if we embraced them, not from the perspective of how much we can do for them, but of how much we can learn from them about how not to slow-boil yourself to death. Imagine that.

How to be Successful as a Screenwriter

When you’re learning to write a screenplay, or you’re writing your first or your whatever, and you have no experience or contacts in the movie world but you’re passionate about your work and you have a powerful dream, you’re pretty vulnerable. You tend to believe anything anybody tells you so long as they do it convincingly.

You’re easy pickings for self-styled authorities who earn a grand living with books or lectures or seminars on how to write the perfect screenplay, how to avoid the mistakes that amateurs make. Who tell you that unless you write the perfect screenplay you won’t be able to sell it. And they of course know how to identify that perfection and formularize it. They make it sound so cut and dried.

You think – right! All I have to do is do what they tell me and I’ll be able to write the perfect screenplay and I’ll be made. QED, Quite Easily Done, as a mad Maths teacher once told me with a scary giggle. Better get onto that Oscar speech.

The vulnerability of scriptwriters not confident in their own judgment, humble enough and willing to learn and desperate to succeed has made for a giant sector within the movie industry. There’s everything right and nothing wrong with learning from pros, but it’s the gurus who believe they have plumbed the depths of the success formula and who seamlessly forge a connection between what they can teach you at a goodly price – or simply for their ego trip - and you being able to sell your screenplay that gets my goat.

If they’ve so got their finger on the success pulse, why are so many terrible scripts made into films? Here’s the reality: there’s no formula to success in selling your screenplay.

Take this scenario: you write a screenplay, you hand it to an editor. They tell you to throw it in the dumpster, there’s nothing of any value in it. You follow their advice. Well that’s the end of that, isn’t it? The next day you retrieve it and show it to another editor. They think it has merit but you need to change the sex of your protagonist. You don’t want to, so you show it to another editor, who says the sex of the protagonist is fine, but you need to change the storyline and they tell you how.

If you were to follow their advice you’d of course be ghostwriting their screenplay. But you follow it anyway, because you’re a novice and they know what they’re talking about. Or that’s what you believe. Eventually you write something that pleases this editor. You don’t feel as passionately about it as you did your original story. But you get to show it to a producer. Who doesn’t like it, says the story doesn’t feel authentic. You take a risk and say actually it’s not. The producer asks what you mean. You tell them, you originally wrote a different storyline altogether. The producer says what was it? You tell them. They like it.

As it happens, this is a true story. The writer was a South African, the producer from New York. The writer had attended a very prescriptive course and was told unless he changed his screenplay completely he didn’t have a chance in hell of it ever being read by a producer. He’d be lucky if it ever made it to the pile of reading matter in any producer’s toilet.

You can’t formularize why somebody succeeds and somebody doesn’t. You can read screenplays that you think are brilliant – and that probably somebody else thinks are dreadful – and learn what you can from them. You can study the craft, and structure that goes back to Greek plays. You can study people in depth so that your work reflects your insight. But, some people want that in films, some people don’t get it and don’t care. Or you can not understand people at all, and write something childish and shallow. Some will love it, some will hate it. You can please some but you can’t please all, no matter what you do.

Robert de Niro said once about auditioning that it’s pointless trying to impress the director. The best you can do is forget about impressing anybody, but just do the best you can. Be as authentically you as possible, because that’s where your greatest strength lies. I thought it was pretty good advice for any kind of creative enterprise.

Once you’ve done your best with a screenplay, you can show what you’ve written to anybody you want, but how do you know that any suggestions they make will make your work better or more marketable? You don’t. The impact of art in any form is totally subjective; there is no ultimate good or bad, especially with movies. Personally, I think it makes sense to do the best you can, then set about doing the best you can to sell it to a producer. If one says yes, I’ll buy it and here’s the money but I want you to change something, then if you want the money you can say fine, I’ll change it, when the money’s in my bank account.

Otherwise, you’re kind of pissing into the wind by changing things because other people think you should. You could spend your whole life trying to ‘perfect’ one screenplay. Better to write a score of less than perfect and try and sell them, and learn by your own experience how to be more powerful in what you want to say in your writing and in pitching to producers. Whether that power actually creates success or not I can’t say, but I do know it impacts on people. It’s kind of an animal thing.

Here’s what else I know; writing a screenplay is a huge amount of work. I can’t imagine anything worse than spending my whole life writing to try and please somebody else but never pleasing myself. And imagine if I never sold anything anyway. What a total waste of a life that would be.

Zuckerberg and Facebook; a Tale of Ingenuity, Vision, Power and Greed

The story of Facebook is more and more looking like a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Once upon a time a country was created out of virtually nothing by an idealistic young man who thought it would be a good idea if friends could meet up in cyberspace and share their lives.  Share their friends, even, meet new people. Everything was rosy as first. His subjects didn’t realize they were his subjects at all, and they got free connection to all their friends. Fun was had by all in this land of plenty. 

But of course the creator realized he could make money out of it – and who could blame him? Even creators have to live. He was clever about it, and money started to flow as the country grew beyond even his wildest dreams. Soon it had a gigantic monthly population – close to a billion, or so its PR machine said.

But by then the beauty of the original dream had begun to significantly dim as the money and the power went to the creator’s head. World dominance is a seductive thing, so is a giant bank account, and who doesn’t dream of Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange? But the subjects realized this country wasn’t any longer so much about connecting friends, it was about how to use friends – anybody’s friends - to sell something, or shove something down your throat, whether you wanted to hear about it or not.

And it sure wasn’t free at all, they paid with their privacy. The homepages got busier and busier, with targeted ads, whether you wanted them or not. Imposters flourished because there was inadequate security; the country became a breeding ground for exploitation. 

And those figures of almost a billion daily users a month – convenient for drawing advertisers and thus investors - well, they turned out not to be totally provable, as anybody can have as many accounts as they want and the creator hadn’t set up a monitoring system. Strange, considering how creative he was. You’d think he’d have known how to put that in place. There was no system to differentiate between real, active users and automatic updates happening, either.

Apart from that, subjects began to be disillusioned, and the exponential growth of the country began to slip. Rumors abounded about the creator once saying at college that anybody who trusted him with their personal information was a “dumb fuck”. And a film was made about a young kid in college who he allegedly stole the idea from in the first place. Who in real life he paid out millions in a settlement. 

One subject allegedly said of him that he “…turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary, and an incredible altruist." (Wiki) Well, that subject won a Golden Globes best screenplay award for the abovementioned film, so perhaps a little bias is understandable. Perhaps he really meant it, even though his script portrayed the creator in not such a great light. Hindsight is easy when you’re clutching an award. But other subjects were saddened at the loss of the real opportunity for the creator, to make plenty money for himself, as he deserved for his ingenuity, but never to lose sight of his original goal, that this would be about friends connecting, and thus to become an icon for his generation and generations to come in a world where exploitation is so easy. To be happy with some money and not want to dominate the world. 

The story doesn’t have an ending yet. But the moral – a kind of double-edged thing - is pretty clear. Power corrupts, and people don’t like being exploited. You can’t start something with a philanthropic idea and, when it attracts millions because of its inherent philanthropy, turn it into something where you use everybody, and think that people aren’t going to notice and object. We’re not all dumb fucks.

For other opinions, read Janet Tavakoli at the huffingtonpost.com, and Somini Sengupta at nytimes.com.