What John Keats Teaches About Failing

A note to young leaders.

Declare your ambition early. Begin early. Fail early. And take notes along the way.

John Keats was just 21 when he announced to the world that he would write a 4,000 line poem on a single Greek myth. It was to be a test of his creative powers.

He told his readers to expect “great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.”

And the poem, Endymion, turned out roughly as he feared: passages of prodigy stranded in acres of mediocrity, like a garden planted by a genius and tended by nobody.

The critics were quick to put the boot in. He was dismissed as an “ignorant and unsettled pretender.” His education was mocked, his friends were ridiculed, his right to hold a pen was questioned.

His reaction to the criticism was nothing short of exemplary, especially given his youth: “Praise or blame,” he wrote, “has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty makes him a severe critic of his own works.”

Then he defended not the poem but the decision to write it: “In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.”

Within a year of the “failure”, he had produced the great odes – the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, Autumn – a burst of concentrated creative achievement with almost no equal in the English language.

The green shore is always available. The tea is always warm. The comfortable advice never runs out. Nobody was ever counted among the greatest for staying there.