When writing my manifesto, I started researching in all of the traditional avenues (ie. Googling 'motivational work ethic quotes') and decided I didn't want to go with something long-winded like the below example.
These types of quotes are great, but they're using a lot of words to say very little. I knew I wanted something short and effective that always reminded me to give my all in anything I create, regardless of the result.
I started looking at renowned creatives to try and draw inspiration from their mantras. I looked at Louise Bourgeois who was quoted as saying:
“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
I started to ask myself how I made my own motivation survive and realised that, often, I don't. I am prone to allowing myself to become discouraged at the slightest inconvenience and this can lead to me undertaking tasks with little enthusiasm or care for the end result. I started to think about whether or not I could take this realisation and put it into motivation in and of itself.
I started to take inspiration from the Samuel Beckett quote,
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
The idea of purposely trying again and again, knowing you're likely to keep failing but all the while improving your failures was an outlook I could find myself embracing. I know that I struggle to accept failure and knew I wanted a manifesto to challenge that and get me out of the thinking that failures are ultimate, final and consuming and instead embrace failures as another step towards a better failure and, with any luck, a success.