um james dutra have you ever had a total failure that the client
boss liked better than what they had originally asked for
that is a great question i don't think so
that would be a really neat boss to work for though right like somebody who saw like that
that would be cool it's a great question ian crook says do you collect
your failures to potentially fix them later or act as a reminder of your growth
the latter act as a reminder of my growth i hang the failures all over the place
i hang them from the ceiling i've got a old dinosaur neck over there um in fact it's my one
it's my having traveled around to hundreds of maker spaces around the united states and around
the world my biggest complaint about maker spaces is that they're too damn clean uh i think that
makerspace's walls should be packed salon style with all of the failures that are continuing to
happen every day in that space i think that's the kind of inspiration that every makerspace should
engender that's my personal opinion that you know if you have a makerspace you don't want to do that
that's fine um but uh i do think it's really instructive to look at to look at that stuff up
on the walls i mean one of the first shops i ever worked in had a piece of plywood with a classic
mark on it that spoke to someone who had not been using a fence and the piece of wood flew back on
them and someone root on it mr table saw does not like it when you don't hold the wood firmly
that is an instruction it is a great visual instruction
um as to the cost of failure of using the table saw so i get a lot out of hanging my previous work
and the iterations of a project up on the wall and i save a lot of those i mean there's also there's
there is something really beautiful about the object years later you know that thing you
screwed up i don't know if i have one nearby but like that thing you screwed up it's emotionally
activating you today but five years from now you'll pick it up and you'll be like
yeah i remember this remember this day um it's good to connect with that stuff i think so i do
hold on to my failures when they're aesthetically interesting and i do
hang them up around me in order to be able to see them because i i definitely find that inspiring um
you know the entire back wall of my shop is uncompleted projects
it's things i've half done or haven't even gotten started with but i really do want to get to some
day and i have a whole nother storage of them up here in the loft um but those aren't failures per
se they're just they're projects that haven't happened yet but again i gain a lot for myself
out of having that stuff visually available to me the cacophony of like seeing it all
is inspiring i take one more okay we're gonna take one more question uh i think that is all
the ones from the live stream um ah alex g reed you mentioned in the past an experience where
you did not do a good job working on a film and led to an end of the end of a friendship
did that experience change your approach to method uh and methodology for collaborations yeah
yeah okay so um tldr i was 19 years old in new york and i took on the task of art directing
a friend of mine's film she was producing and i uh there is a talk that i did at maker faire
uh i guess if we release this we can put it in the comments of standalone video about this um
and yeah i screwed up so badly that a person who was one of my closest friends said to me that she
was no longer my friend and i had never until that moment i had never felt that low and i recalled
my dad and i was talking about it i was weeping about it i just was really really upset and sad
and i felt really shitty i felt like a terrible person and my dad said you really screwed up
and you are not a terrible person you are a person and all you can do from this is resolve
to not do it again you can't fix what you've done you can't undo what you've done and you
can apologize to the people you did it to that's not going to help i mean you should it's not going
to change the situation all you can do is resolve to try and not let that same thing happen again
that was a lovely graceful thing to say because
yeah after i did that i realized oh i have a hero complex i want to solve all the problems and i
don't like asking for help clearly this problem occurred because i didn't know how to ask for help
and about six or eight months later a young filmmaker came to me who was
much more higher placed in the film industry and he was making a personal film in new york and this
film had a real budget and he had an incredibly complex special effect he wanted to achieve
of a bedroom being yanked out of a building in whole cloth right so like bricks and mortar and
all of this stuff happening and he asked me to bid on it and i bid on it but in the bid i said i
can't tackle this job alone it's going to require extra people and thus the budget's going to be at
least this and i didn't get the job i'm so glad that i did not get that job like that was exactly
the right thing to do at that moment was this job is bigger than anything i've done before if i am
going to tackle it i can't possibly do the same thing i did before i must change my ways and know
to ask for help and i think at that early stage in my career of making stuff and making stuff
on jobs for other people at that early stage i didn't know how to say that without sounding
i think i probably sounded like a real neophyte i probably sounded like what i was a super green
late teenager which is fine that's what i was i you know i avoided a lot of a lot more mistakes
that way by being attentive to that part of my personality that doesn't like asking for help
yeah i don't like asking for help it's a fascinating
i i i one of the things i listen to a lot here in the shop is bill withers lately i find
i find bill withers loving cynicism about the world to be exactly the bomb i want right now and
that song call on me brother when you need a hand
there's a lyric in which he says and i had never listened to it before this year i'd never really
taken in this lyric where he says i can't help you with any problem that you won't let me see
such a beautiful beautiful thing for a friend to say um and it is important in both relationships
and also professionally to communicate about these things that we don't know how to do
and that's hard you know my son was telling me about working in the restaurant industry
we were cooking together and i was cutting stuff up for my kid he i was like tell me if
i'm doing this wrong he's like yeah no you're doing fine and i'm like when you're in the
restaurant this chef told show you exactly how he wants it done my son's like no they don't do
that in the kitchen they just tell you to figure it out it's like that is tough man
but the only way you're going to learn is by screwing it up and then eventually getting it
right um i really appreciate you all spending time with me in this space today talking about failure
and iteration and recovery and self-forgiveness i think that's really what we're always talking
about when we're talking about screwing up in in any way uh we're talking about forgiving ourselves
and what are we really forgiving ourselves for we're not forgiving ourselves for like screwing
up that thing we're forgetting ourselves for being a human being which is messy and confusing and
opaque and ridiculous and humiliating and magical and loving and transformative and transcendent and
yeah i'm very grateful uh so thank you guys so much for joining me for this live stream i
again if i didn't get to your question today i i'm going to answer some more of these over
the next coming weeks because there's some really really good questions here
stay safe uh i'm so excited uh if you get to see your loved ones soon i'm so excited for you it is
awesome uh and i will see you guys at the next live stream thanks so much