The privilege of failure
I recently had a chat with a creative director at DDB. He said that copywriters don't win year-end awards for their ideas. If you're a copywriter worth your salt, you should come up with award-caliber ideas every day. Receiving an award for copywriting is recognition that you successfully escorted your idea past the gatekeepers. First you had to convince the account executive to present the idea to the client. After that point, you alternately prodded, reassured, politicked and occasionally growled. The award honors your effort to persevere, not the relatively commonplace excellence of the creation itself.
At Banana Florist, we don't have gatekeepers. If an idea makes two people laugh, it gets the green light. While we'd hesitate before suggesting that any of our ideas are "award-caliber," we do appreciate our freedom. If we end up failing, we'll fail on our own terms. We won't slink away choking on resentments, wondering what might have been, had we only been given a chance.
More than dreams of striking it big, the ability to fail on your own terms is surely the greatest privilege of striking out on your own.