How to Fail Successfully

Finding Your Creative Potential Through Mistakes and Challenges

From Brandon Stosuy, comes this interactive guide to navigating disappointments and finding happy accidents in a creative life, filled with advice from artists across disciplines.

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. 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.

Dimensions: 14.5 x 21cm
144 page paperback interactive book