I am obsessed with failure.

Most of the time, it’s all I can focus on. The obvious failures hurt: the projects we lost, the clients who left, the money we left on the table, some of the friends I used to have who I don’t talk to anymore, and the million little decisions I’d make differently if I could do them again. But I can find failure in the successes too. There are shots in the Björk video I produced 18 years ago that I hate. Creative Control, a feature I produced 10 years ago, has one scene that still makes me cringe. Give me almost any success from the last 20 years and I can probably tell you what was wrong with it.

Instead of seeing the finished thing, I see the version that could have been. The shot we should have gotten, the idea we should have pushed harder, the decision I would make differently now. Success has a way of fading into the past pretty quickly. The mistakes stick around because my brain keeps trying to fix them.

As a leader and a boss, I’ve had to learn not to let that instinct turn me into someone who’s constantly pointing out what’s wrong. I’m better at it than I used to be, but deep down I still find it hard to ever be completely satisfied. That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. I know how incredibly lucky I am to do what I do. Running a creative company for more than 20 years is a success in and of itself. It’s also an enormous privilege.

But I also think all of this obsessing over what went wrong has probably been useful. Failure is a form of learning. Educators call it “productive struggle.” The business world has its own, slightly more obnoxious term for it: “fail fast.” The basic premise is pretty simple: try something, figure out whether it works as quickly as possible, learn from it, and move on before you’ve spent too much time or money going in the wrong direction.

When I was still in film school, I worked on everything I could. It took me outside my friend group and my comfort zone and put me in situations I probably never would have found myself in otherwise. Mostly, I just wanted to start getting paid, so I took whatever I could find on Craigslist that would give me $100 (along with plenty of other things that paid me nothing at all). Eventually I met Zach Mortensen on Craigslist, and the two of us started working together.

At the time, I thought the goal was to make movies. I wanted to be a filmmaker because filmmaking felt noble and good. But after working on a half-dozen feature films, I got restless. I just wasn’t failing fast enough. I could usually tell within the first week of production that a movie was doomed, but it didn’t matter. I was still going to spend the next two months sweating, suffering and getting very little sleep making the thing.

I also started realizing that there was a difference between doing a good job on someone else’s project and making something I actually cared about. On those feature films, I could work my ass off, do everything I was supposed to do, and still end up with a movie I didn’t particularly like. I didn’t have much say in the creative decisions, but I was spending months of my life executing them.

In between those features, I would make music videos with friends, or random people I met online, and that’s where I found my groove. I had more ownership over what we were making, which meant I could take more chances and make my own mistakes. A few weeks later, I’d have a finished video, a new skill, and a much better idea of what I’d do differently next time. Of course, I would watch the finished video and mostly notice the things I wished we had done better.

Music videos led to commercials, and eventually we built a company around trying things we hadn’t done before. That was always the part that interested me. Why would I want to do the same thing over and over again? Why would I want to work with a director who only made car commercials, or only made comedy spots? I was much more interested in finding people who were willing to take some risk together and figure it out as we went.

As we got deeper into the commercial world, we started bumping into the wall of conservative corporate America. So much of advertising is designed to mitigate risk, which makes sense. If you’re pouring hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars into something, you probably don’t want the people making it to say, “We’ve never done this before, but trust us.”

So we started pushing the edges of what people expected from us. The client didn’t ask us to write the script, but we wrote one anyway. We made deliverables we didn’t owe and were early to embrace that new piece of technology or social platform everyone just started using. At some point we started using strategy to sell our ideas even though none of us had ever actually worked with a strategist.

We did this for a good 10 years. We got in way over our heads plenty of times, but that was the beauty of it. A few weeks later, the project would be over, we’d know a little more than we did before, and then we’d go try something else. Eventually all of those little experiments became the business model.

Some of the experiments went better than others.

We once went completely overboard pitching a huge tech brand. We made a video on spec, worked our asses off, and got a round of applause at the end of the presentation. Then the CMO walked in and killed it.

A line producer accidentally cc’d a client on an email talking shit about them. Three separate million-dollar productions got canceled, and we had to sue one client to get paid. An actor posted pictures from set and got a video canceled. Two employees disappeared, one with a bunch of cash, the other with his computer. We got sued after a PA allegedly hit someone with a cube truck. Someone broke into our office.

There’s more. A lot more.

And weirdly, I wouldn’t trade most of it. Some of those experiences were miserable, expensive, or embarrassing, and plenty of them weren’t even our fault. But they changed how we worked, who we trusted, and what we did the next time something went wrong.

It’s probably also why I’m a little suspicious of expertise that comes from doing the same thing over and over again. Repetition can make you incredibly good at something. But it can also make you incredibly good at avoiding situations where you might be bad at something, and I’m not sure that’s always a good thing. I still like being a beginner. I like trying something I don’t totally know how to do yet.

The funny thing is that after spending most of my career trying to convince clients that it was okay to let us try something we hadn’t done before, that’s increasingly the actual need. Social alone has made it almost impossible to know exactly what’s going to work before you make it. You make a bunch of things, some work, some don’t, something weird takes off that nobody expected, and then six months later the thing that worked doesn’t work anymore.

That requires getting a little more comfortable with things not working, which is a hard thing to ask of people who are spending a lot of money and have bosses of their own. You can’t spend six months trying to engineer the risk out of every idea, but you also can’t just throw a bunch of shit at the wall and call it experimentation.

This is probably the part I understand better now than I did 20 years ago. Taking risks and being reckless aren’t the same thing. If you’re going to experiment, you need something solid underneath you. You need to know who you are and what you’re trying to say. You need some systems and some structure so you’re not starting over every single time. The goal isn’t to make failure impossible. It’s to make sure one bad idea doesn’t burn the whole thing down.

Twenty years of failing hasn’t taught me how to eliminate risk. If anything, I’m less interested in eliminating it than I’ve ever been. What I’ve gotten better at is creating the conditions where we can take risks without betting everything on every single one. Experience makes the landing a little softer. It helps you recognize the difference between a worthwhile experiment and a stupid gamble, and when something doesn’t work, figure out why so the next thing can be better.

I still have plenty more things to screw up. But they’ll be new, exciting things. I can’t wait.

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In high school, I worked on the student newspaper. At some point, I had managed to get tickets to a taping of Saturday Night Live, which was a pretty big deal to me, so I wrote an article about the experience and included instructions for how other people could get tickets. This was before you could just Google this stuff, so the most useful piece of information was an address you had to write to.

After the newspaper came out, I started finding copies lying around school with the address torn out. I loved that. People had actually read something I made and found it useful enough to rip a piece of it out and put it in their pocket. I don’t remember anything else I wrote for the newspaper, and I don’t know if anyone ever actually got SNL tickets, but I remember those little missing rectangles.

I think I’ve always liked making things people can hold. Years later, we had an amazing Ghost Robot office in Williamsburg. We moved there in 2012, when moving a creative company to Williamsburg still felt like a bold decision. It was on the ground floor of a building on Grand Street, with two big storefronts facing the sidewalk. Lots of light, huge windows, and a feeling that you were connected to whatever was happening outside.

Every so often, someone would wander through our door, look around at a bunch of people sitting at computers, and have no idea what they had stumbled into. They would ask some version of, “What do you guys do here?” This was a reasonable question because we weren’t always entirely sure either.

Ghost Robot started as a production company, but by then we were doing a lot of things that didn’t fit neatly into that definition. We made films and commercials, but we were also making websites, experimenting with new technology, publishing graphic novels, and producing our own projects. We had always struggled a little bit with how to explain all of it, so rather than coming up with a better elevator pitch, we built a store.

We put a little retail shop in the front of the office with Ghost Robot shirts, our famous knit caps, copies of graphic novels that Zach Mortensen was publishing at the time, and other objects and knick-knacks we liked. The idea was to curate the store a few times a year around a theme, create some new things, make a zine, and throw a party. A T-shirt would tell part of the story, an object would tell another part, the zine would connect the dots, and the party would bring people into the whole thing for a night.

We had some awesome parties. There was usually some new technology we were playing with, an artist whose work we liked, or some strange thing one of us had become interested in that we could find an excuse to put in front of people. Reggie Watts performed. Hannibal Buress was a collaborator. We had drag queen guitarists, dance troupes, a live interactive drawing competition, and augmented reality art. We started thinking about Ghost Robot less like a production company and more like a magazine. We were constantly curating and editing, looking for interesting things, putting them next to other interesting things, and trying to figure out what it all meant. The things we explored on our own had a funny habit of eventually finding their way into our client work.

The zines were my favorite part of all of this, and I fell in love with making them. I was never trained as a designer, and I certainly wouldn’t claim to be an expert in typography or print design. I just liked the puzzle. With a zine, the constraints are very obvious. You have a certain number of pages, a certain page size, and a certain amount of space. We were offset printing ours, so color was a very real consideration too. Every additional color meant another plate, another pass through the press, and more money. You can’t just make whatever you want. You have to figure out how creative you can be inside a very specific space.

One of my favorite music videos ever is for Papas Fritas, directed by Mike Mills. It’s a great song, and the video is incredibly simple. The concept is basically: let’s go to Central Park, wear these colorful jackets, and find as many interesting things to do as possible. Some minimal props and very basic animation round it out. That’s pretty much it, and it’s great. It has an energy and charisma that I don’t think could have been improved by giving them ten times the budget. There are countless music videos with more locations, more equipment, more effects, more people, and more stuff that aren’t half as memorable.

Zines are a perfect reflection of this philosophy. The stuff isn’t the idea. More pages don’t necessarily make something more interesting. More colors don’t make a design better. More locations don’t make a film better. More money can certainly give you more options, and there are plenty of times when more time or more money would make our work easier, but none of those things solve the creative problem for you.

Because we are cognitive misers, breakthrough creativity happens when the easy and intuitive path is blocked–by choice, or by force.

^{David Epstein, Inside the Box}

We ended up making seven or eight zines for ourselves in Williamsburg. Eventually clients started asking us to make them too. We made one for the U by Kotex Period Shop, a pop-up store we created in New York. We made one for NYC Ferry with illustrated instructions in the corner showing you how to fold the zine itself into a paper boat, which remains my favorite unnecessary detail we’ve ever put into a client project.

When I opened Friendly City, my storefront studio in Hudson, I continued the tradition. We did an art show about trash and made a zine. We did a sticker show to raise money for Friends of Hudson Youth and made another one. We made a risograph program for a fundraising gala that was probably much more elaborate than a fundraising gala program needed to be. I’ve continued to find excuses to make them even though they’re not a particularly meaningful part of any business I’ve run. I’ve never made much money making zines, I have no formal qualifications to make them, and I’m not really sure anyone thinks of me as someone who makes them. Yet I would be very happy if someone paid me to make them all day.

It’s because a zine is a pretty perfect metaphor for the kind of creative problem I like solving. Every project has a box around it. Sometimes it’s page count and paper size. Sometimes it’s a budget, a deadline, a media format, a client need, or the fact that you only have access to one location for six hours on a Tuesday.

For most creatives, the instinct is to make the box bigger. Bigger budgets, more time, more people, more options. [To be clear, I like all of those things too; please give us more money and more time.] But the box doesn’t go away. Our job is to recognize the constraints, define the box, and then explore every square millimeter of it.

The creative process should be like the DVD loading screen that The Office made famous. You bounce around inside the box, hit one wall, change direction, hit another wall, and keep going. Most of the time nothing particularly exciting happens. Occasionally you hit the corner perfectly, and everyone loses their mind.

Constraints aren’t something you need to get past before you can do the interesting work. Working with them is the interesting work.

We’ve been told more than once that we have too many systems and procedures in place at Ghost Robot. I get it. We’re a small company. Why fill out a form when you can just Slack someone?

Zach and I have been working together for over 20 years. We started when you still had to fax things and build physical binders and file folders for every aspect of a project. Equipment lists, POs, contracts, releases, insurance certificates. Everything had its place. And if you wanted something done a certain way, you needed a clear process for doing it.

We had a production manual. It was over 20 pages long. And we’re talking an old-fashioned Word doc. 12-point font. Not a fancy deck with big words and bold images.

So when employees complain about having to do too much paperwork, it may help to remember where we came from.

The funny thing is that when people leave Ghost Robot and move on to their next job, they inevitably call us up asking for our manuals, our file trees, or one of the forms we’ve spent decades refining. I once heard from a freelancer who went to work at another studio and discovered they were using all of our old forms. I guess that’s a form of flattery.

For years, we’ve operated under the mantra “systems create freedom.” A quick Google search confirms we did not come up with this ourselves.

The basic idea is simple: well-designed systems eliminate daily chaos, decision fatigue, and constant reinvention. If you can standardize the repetitive stuff, you get back time and brain space for the things that actually require thought, judgment, and creativity.

Do the boring stuff well, and you have more room for the fun stuff.

Recently, I got curious and went down a wormhole looking through old versions of our employee manuals. I found one from 2007 that included a list of things every production assistant was expected to carry with them:

• Pouch

• Pad of paper

• Pen/pencil/Sharpies

• Watch

• Work gloves

• Knife

• Driver’s license

• Matches

• Clothespins

• Crew list

• Contact list

• Call sheet

• Quarters

• Belt for walkie-talkie

• Maglite

That’s right. Quarters.

Because when your cellphone died, or your pager went off, you needed to be able to find a payphone, call the office after making a run, and see if there was anything else they needed you to pick up.

If I remember correctly, this list originally came from a PA manual that legendary indie producer Ted Hope had put together. So with that in mind, I suppose I can’t be too mad that other companies have adopted our forms.

Around that same time, we were in the original Ghost Robot office at 373 Broadway, just south of Canal Street, where Tribeca and Chinatown meet. The office couldn’t have been more than 300 square feet. We had big windows overlooking Broadway with wide limestone ledges outside. We used to open the windows, climb out, and sit on those ledges to smoke cigarettes six stories above the street.

It was a different time.

Back then, and for much of Ghost Robot’s early existence, we always had an intern around the office. Some of them were great and ambitious and wanted to know everything. Some of them just sat around waiting to be told what to do. [Little-known fact: I met Zach when I was an intern on one of his shoots. Two years later, I was helping him build a new company.]

Around the same time we published our original manual, we had an intern I’ll call John.

John was quiet and hardworking. He did what he was asked to do, and that was pretty much it. He also always wore a backpack. He wore it when he went on runs. He wore it when he came back. He even wore it while sitting in the office waiting for something to do.

More than once, we wondered what the deal was with the backpack. What could he possibly need to carry with him everywhere he went? What would it take to get it off his back? Mostly, we just thought he was a weird guy.

One day, John came back from a run and was acting strangely. He stood by the door and wouldn’t move, muttering to himself and swaying back and forth. We asked if he was all right. He grumbled a “yeah” back.

He clearly wasn’t.

When we asked again, he was barely responsive. We tried to get him to sit down, and he collapsed onto the floor. He started to convulse.

We called 911. While we waited, we took off his backpack so he could lie flat. [Side note: I recently took a Red Cross First Aid course for a coaching license. EVERYONE should do this.]

EMS arrived and took him to the hospital.

His backpack was still sitting on the floor.

We didn’t have an emergency contact for him, but we knew someone needed to know what had happened, so we opened his backpack hoping to find his phone or something that might tell us who to call.

We found his driver’s license and address and were able to parlay that into a number for his mom. She told us John was diabetic and that his blood sugar had dropped dangerously low.

And then we found a few other things.

In addition to his driver’s license, there was a pouch. A pad of paper. Pens, pencils, and Sharpies. Work gloves. A knife. His driver’s license. Matches. Clothespins. A crew list. A contact list. A call sheet. Quarters. A belt for his walkie-talkie. A Maglite.

Everything on the list.

My heart sank.

This guy we barely knew had taken us completely seriously. We had handed him a list of what a good PA was supposed to carry, and he had gone out and gotten every single thing on it. He carried it with him every day because we told him to.

Meanwhile, I knew almost nothing about him.

A few hours earlier, I probably would have told you he was the quiet intern with the weird backpack. Now he was on his way to the hospital, I was scared, and we were digging through that backpack because we didn’t even know who to call.

I felt like shit.

He had taken the time to learn exactly what we expected of him. I hadn’t taken the time to learn much of anything about him.

For years, I’ve thought about the story as a lesson in how you treat people, especially young people who are just starting. But it also changed the way I think about all those systems and manuals we’d been so careful to build.

We thought we were writing down how to do the work. But to someone new, we were also telling them what mattered. Yet for all the things we had thought to put into our systems, we hadn’t thought to ask for an emergency contact. We had documented what kind of flashlight a PA should carry, but not who to call if that PA ended up in an ambulance.

So we added a form.

Twenty years later, we’ve evolved as a company. We’re less concerned with what you need to take to set and more concerned with how to solve business problems for our clients. Strategy, creative thinking, communication, curiosity, production. The work evolved, so the systems had to evolve with it.

We still have a lot of them. Some have outlived their usefulness. Some should probably disappear. Every once in a while, someone will ask if they really need to fill that thing out. And sometimes they’re right.

The answer isn’t to have no systems. It’s to keep building better ones.

A good system means the person who knows the answer doesn’t always have to be there. It means the newest person at the company doesn’t have to know who to ask, or be afraid of asking a stupid question. It means we don’t have to solve the same problem from scratch every time it comes up.

But a good system also needs to leave room for judgment. John’s list gave him a very specific definition of what a good PA should carry, and he followed it perfectly. What it couldn’t tell him was which things really mattered, which rules were flexible, or when circumstances had changed enough that it was okay to throw the whole thing out the window.

While I was in my handbook-hole, I pulled up the most recent welcome packet we give new employees. We had recently gone through a brand refresh and spent a lot of time rethinking how we talk about Ghost Robot, what we do, and what we care about. But the document we hand someone on their first day still belonged to an older version of the company.

So I rewrote it.

What started as an update to some old policies became something a little different. There are still procedures in there. How we use email. How we communicate deadlines. Where files should live. How projects move through the company. The boring stuff.

But there’s also a lot more about why we work the way we do. What we expect from each other. How we approach problems. What it means to be curious. When to follow the process and when to question it. The old manual was mostly about how to do your job. The new one is more about how we work together.

Systems create freedom. I still believe that. But systems also tell people what you care about. So be careful what you put on the list.

Here’s our new welcome packet.

Feel free to steal it.