I was tasked with making my first magazine ads at the age of 15, alongside ads from companies such as Speedo. This responsibility created anxiety and stress in my early marketing life, that I have had to work on ever since. My acceptance of that pressure has been tamed the more I embrace the concept of “failing forward.” What I mean when I say “failing forward” is accepting the reality that I am going to fail, but that I will learn and move forward from the failure. There is so much wasted energy in the pursuit of perfection.
Perfection means having an unlimited amount of time, resources, and budget. In my experience, there has never been anything unlimited. With the “failing forward” way of thinking, I have been able to see each failure as an opportunity to learn and move forward with better ideas and practices. Of course, I have struggled with the thought of failure, but it is something that I have had to accept. If perfection is not possible, due to lack of resources and time, then the result should be as close to perfection as possible with the available resources.
For ONE Swim, there were a ton of failures, but we moved on and forward from them. One example of a failure was our early product photoshoots. We chose to do a daily photoshoot at our outdoor city pool in the mornings, after our swim team practices and before it would open to the public. The photos that resulted from these photoshoots were not ideal. The pool was never fully clean, had a green color to it, and had direct sunlight, that made it very difficult to see the swimmer and product as clearly as we desired. When I created ads using photos taken in that pool, I found that it was best to change the images to black and white. This solved most of our problems from images in that pool. Could we have gone to other pools and gotten better photos from it? Yes. There were other pools around us that we could have rented for photoshoots, but we ultimately decided it was not worth it to go to those for several reasons. We had so many products that we preferred doing short, 2-hour photoshoots daily rather than a few 8-hour photoshoots. We later moved onto shooting at a much nicer pool, for long all-day shoots, but we could not afford to do that in the beginning due to a major lack of time. In the end we did ‘fail forward’ with the quality of our photos but there is always a better camera, a better filter, more time needed to edit a photo, etc.…
Mallory Tilson 