Let me share with you parts of an interesting article by Colin Dodds.
(H/T to the always amusing Passive Guy — if you don’t read him, you should.)

10 degrees of failure

Here are the inescapable gradations of artistic failure. It starts from the most complete, though perhaps least painful, failure. It ends with the failure that looks the most like success, but may hurt the most.

1. It never occurred to you: This is most painful when it occurs to someone else, and their version is good.
2. You never got around to it: A vague regret, a recurrent ache, a repeated plan told to friends and acquaintances that makes you a bore.
3. You never finished it.
4. It didn’t come out like you thought it would. It’s disappointing. Whether or not your judgment is right is anyone’s guess.
5. You never showed it to anyone.
6. It never got made: That could mean no agent, no publisher, no gallery, no theater or no movie studio ever bought in and brought it to the broader world. Or you never had the money, time or conviction to do it yourself.
7. It was made, but no one noticed.
8. People noticed and cared, but it never made money.
9. It made money, but no one thought about it afterwards.
10. It set the world on fire, but even that didn’t matter: Think of Paul Cezanne refusing the Paris Salon after decades trying to get in, or Mark Rothko killing himself after months haunting a retrospective of his works at MOMA.

Feeding Homer (Stories finding readers)

Why do you like something? Motivation is part of it, necessarily. How much is hard to suss out. It’s one more reason why it’s hard to really answer whether or not something is good.

Take Homer, and the Iliad – a hard book to talk about. In terms of how we live, it’s about as foreign as a whale song. But it also crowds up close as a middle-school friend at a local bar the night before Thanksgiving. The mix of deep recognition and utter incomprehension is why every new translation seems to bring fresh news.

Before they were written down, Homer’s works persisted through something like 450 years in purely oral form. And that shit is expensive. You can leave a book on a shelf at very little expense. But to keep people telling the same story for like 25 or 30 generations of guys – breakfast lunch and dinner – costs real coin. The expense cuts both ways. That’s more than two dozen generations of bright guys who decided to throw in their lot with an old story.

Now this may seem like a worthy investment by the state, if you look at it from the perspective of a culture with endowments and grants and tenure. But there weren’t any MacArthur Grants or Kennedy Center Honors. The Iliad was making the rounds during the Greek Dark Ages, when something so bad happened to society that we don’t even know what it was, so bad that its written language was lost for more than two thousand years.

Homer wasn’t a preservation project run from the top down by a confident civilization. It was something kept together from the ground up, kind of like the punk scene of ramen noodles and couches to crash on, but for 500 years, with a civilization slowly rebuilding itself on the back of guys who could sing the 15,000-line equivalent of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird really well.

That doesn’t happen unless people truly want it. But who wanted the Iliad? Just read the thing – no one comes off well. War doesn’t come off well. The biggest hero is a petulant prima donna. The king is trying to chase down his wayward wife. It ain’t propaganda. It’s the personal squabbles, betrayals and failures of a bunch of soldiers who died in a past so distant that it’s more a bedtime story than a history, and who died for more or less nothing. So who wanted to generously pay a whole class of guys to recite it?

Soldiers. It told soldiers what they knew and what needed to hear. It acknowledged that dear and noble friends die for the grandeur of the undeserving few. It nodded to the embarrassing origins of the conflict and the ultimate futility of the campaign. But it also celebrated valor. And by its repeated telling, it insisted and proved that valor would continue to be celebrated.

There are very few true connoisseurs. Every reader or listener of ancient world who dug into their pockets or purses to fish out a denarius was motivated in much the same self-serving way that way you or I are motivated.

The ancient soldiers who knew they’d likely die the next day – and the kings that a minuscule fraction of those soldiers became – paid. They paid to hear a story that, in its telling and in its hearing, effectively obliterated what they couldn’t bear to think.

The guys who told this story, collectively known now as Homer, did well in Greece, which was almost always at war back then. But some people smelled a rat. Plato, for one, said that in any decent state the poets who told these stories would be run out of town.

Those soldiers, though, paid for a song that felt true enough and sounded beautiful enough, but which primarily made it possible to do the hard things they’d have to do. Passed down, the use fades, and the song starts to stand in for reality. To the next clever fellow, it seems like a nice backstory for your startup on the banks of a river in Italy. And on it goes. Be generous. Call it a tradition.

RTWT

What motivates you to keep on trying?