Succeeding Quickly VS Failing Quickly

An idea I was introduced to recently was the concept of 'Succeeding quickly' as opposed to the more popularly spruiked 'Failing quickly'.

'Failing quickly' is one way to explain a popular method in the creative side of the sound design process - for those troublesome sounds which you might not already have a very clear idea for.  It can also be described as 'throwing things at the wall to see what sticks'.  It's like rapid-fire brainstorming in sound design terms.

'Succeeding quickly', on the other hand, is more a case of working on a series of sound effects quickly, dumping the ones you get stuck on in favour of moving on to new ones.  The idea is that rather than spend a day on a sound you just can't seem to nail, you move on to the next sound, and then the next sound, some of which you will probably get first go.

I'd always thought the former method the best approach.  After chewing on the idea for a while though, I think there's a great deal of merit to the latter approach.  Without putting a name to it, this is what I will naturally do on any project which I have free range on.  Certainly this was my approach on Happy Feet 2, where audio milestones were few and non-descriptive.

The advantage of this was that time didn't get wasted troublesome sounds.  I could move on, take care of the low-hanging fruit, and often when I revisited the sound effect the next day I would have much better luck.

Some of it was simply due to being creatively refreshed - lots of artists or writers will tell you how some days they can spend hours on a piece and then the next morning do the same work in minutes (a phenomenon I've noticed that diminishes with experience, but can still occur to the best of us.)  Another reason might be because in the intervening work I've found some inspiration or fallen it into a creative groove.  Either way, at the end of the day, the result is you have more bang to show for your buck (literally, as the case may sometimes be) and a lot less frustration.

Of course, this is more useful is the earlier stages of a project, when there a long list of sound assets that need to be made.  Later on you don't have the luxury of moving on to another sound, because the sound that is giving you trouble needs to be designed yesterday.  That's when the 'Failing quickly' approach can come in handy again.

Anyhow, this is one of those things which is fairly obvious when you stop to think about it, but I'd never actually stopped to think about it before, and putting it down in words helps in figuring out the why and how.  And with that, you can decide which approach best fits your current needs.