The saying goes “When one door closes, another opens.”
The sentiment is sound - don’t get hung up if something doesn’t work out; something else will come your way. The universe re-balances. Zero sum game.
I’ve always felt the analogy doesn’t go far enough. I’ve trained myself for a few years now to focus/search for the advantages after a loss. Framed my mindset to instinctively think that something greater has resulted because of something that didn’t work out.
Tweaked the saying to:
When one door closes, a castle drawbridge lowers.
I’m not normally one for pithy meaningless quotes, and I don’t quite believe this one is. When something I was really excited by falls apart, I’ve started to get excited to see where the opportunity lies.
‘what can i do with this?’
It’s partly my love for the underdog story, but framing it this way rarely allows me to linger on the negative/pointless feelings of the loss.
Every hindrance, every loss, every failure is inefficient as opportunity to pick yourself up and try again. It’s opportunity for evolution. To take on - and succeed at - greater challenge.
I always ask - “what am I not seeing?”
This was true even of my most recent venture - a mentorship program to connect students/grads with practicing professionals. Planned on executing in March, but then the ‘unprecedented times’ kicked in.
I was devastated - months of planning, constant correspondence with a sizable roster of mentors coming to nothing.
Then I started seeing Zoom basically take over coffee chats. Tried it out, saw how easy it was. Adapted the shelved project to virtual 1 hr video calls - pared down the ask to just a one off chat.
That initial failure actually led to rapid growth; we’re a little over one month old, and have tripled our mentor roster since launch.
It’s a service many professionals want to offer, without the hassle. We make it easy. They reach out, we get them up on our site, and connect them the moment we have an interested student. At that point, the mentors just indicate availability, and coolly receive a Zoom invite to the specific date and time.
That’s a more recent example. This idea took hold much earlier, and comes into play often. It’s what I owe my paramount passion for screenwriting to.
I wanted to be a novelist, way back at Western University, studying English Language and Literature. Had a deep love of the classic literary writers. Marcel Proust, in particular, infected my daily thoughts for the duration of my reading his By Swann’s Way. Prose upon prose, diving deeper and deeper into the emotional and mental significance of a simple action; an absent-minded gesture.
With him as my pedestal-ed inspiration, I wrote short stories for a writing class. The professor matter-of-factly dismissed my intent (you already know you’ve failed when you have to explain why you’ve written what you wrote), stating that I had a more visual style, whereas Proust was far more metaphysical. I tended to focus more on concrete visible details, over pages upon pages of inner turmoil.
I was most devastated by how evenly he said it. Not as criticism; not with malice, but simply as an observation. Aloof.
Another assignment came up, and we were allowed to write in a different medium - a poem, a script, etc. I gave a script a shot. Got absorbed in the writing of it, but wasn’t too excited by the product (experimenting with a new medium). I presented to the class.
Never before had I had fellow classmates come up to me after class to ask about my thinking behind the story. It wasn’t the praise that did it for me. It was how many different angles they were reading into the characters. How many different motivations they assigned to the actions and words my characters had spoken.
I’d just written with concrete visible details. My audience did the ‘pages upon pages of inner turmoil’.
The door on novel writing closed, in that class. That castle drawbridge of screenwriting lowered.
I haven’t looked back. What’s ahead is way too exciting to look away. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed writing short stories as much as I enjoy writing scripts.
There’s always an angle.