angela pan wong

paula scher on failure

When you're fulfilling a function—when you're being obedient, in other words, you're doing as expected—you can't learn anything. Because you already know the answer. It's through mistakes that you actually can grow.

You have to get bad in order to get good. You have to try a lot of things and fail in order to make the next discovery...

Now, as a working professional and a partner of Pentagram with a reputation to uphold, I'm probably less likely to make outrageously ugly things. But the downside of that is that the work becomes expected, so I have to make changes on my own. So I began painting as a way to balance and be able to make other discoveries, and I made these very complicated map paintings and they started selling. The success hurt the expression. So I have to go back to R&D and develop some other ways of pushing that.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200905/paula-scher-failure