We’ve all heard the saying  “If at first you don’t succeed, try again”. Right?

I read an interesting magazine article a while back titled “How to Lead a Creative Life”. The article focused primarily on Martin Scorsese (and was a very cool read) but also highlighted several other creative entrepreneurs, including James Dyson – inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Did you know that James Dyson created 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum before he was successful! That’s 5,127 times of not getting it quite right, of what some might call failure.  Wow!

I’m not an expert on vacuums, but I can imagine that what worked for Mr. Dyson was that with every prototype that didn’t quite work, he learned something and then changed/tweaked/improved his model for the next prototype (and so on and so on).

While becoming a singer isn’t quite the same thing as designing a vacuum, the same principle certainly applies. If something isn’t working, well, there’s a reason. Therefore, doing it the exact same way again, will probably be unsuccessful, again. To me, that’s not persistence, that’s just banging your head up against a wall.

So I propose that we change that old saying to “If at first you don’t succeed, learn, make it better and then try again!”

Jennifer