The Illusion of Failure

& Hrishikesh Hirway on the perfect cookie

Hi friend,

Last weekend, my husband Jon and I traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, to speak at Brown University. As part of the programming, Jon taught a master class to a small group of students, and I decided to sit in on it. I wanted to hear their questions. Many are on the verge of graduation—that huge, often confounding transition, where the future is so uncertain. In this time of heightened uncertainty, I was curious to hear how and where they were.

And what I noticed was that these students were so wonderful, so searching and ambitious, so vulnerable—and so full of worry. Many were double majors in the arts and something practical, like economics or applied math, and most of them felt like they needed to choose one or the other. A student studying music and engineering said he was struggling to carve out time to practice his instrument while also pursuing another extremely demanding major. It seemed like a catch-22: In order to determine if music would be a viable path, he’d have to fully commit to it. But was that realistic?

They also had questions about how to preserve the joy and freedom of their creative practice, be it writing or acting or music, if they pursued their art as a profession. One student said she had always loved songwriting—that’s where she feels most free and alive—and not long ago, she decided to go all in and pursue it professionally. The moment she did, everything shifted. Suddenly she was listening to and writing songs differently, focusing on why they worked or what made them popular, and that sense of freedom and joy had evaporated. It was her first glimpse of how capitalism and creative work can feel at odds with each other, and it was making her second-guess her choice.

The political, cultural, and economic contexts may be different than when I graduated from college in 2010—or the decade before that, or before that even—but listening to those students, I realized that the core of their line of inquiry was the same. How do I find my path? Am I going to get it right? They were all feeling the pressure to make the perfect plan that would get them to where they’re supposed to go. It was the exact pressure I felt at their age. I wanted a foolproof plan that would get me there—that would take me to the perfect life.

In the years since then, I’ve learned that there is no there there. There is no moment where you feel a sense of arrival, where you have answered all the questions, where you’ve landed in the perfect place, where everything feels resolved in a final and permanent way. Life is one coming-of-age arc after another, and as Jon told the students, if you identify your values and hold to them, you can’t go wrong. There is no such thing as failure, only learning. It’s so liberating and so true—to know that you can’t take the wrong path. You can only take your path.

And with that, I’d like to introduce today’s guest contributor, Hrishikesh Hirway, a singer and songwriter and the host of the popular music podcast Song Exploder. I had the great honor of meeting Hrishikesh a few months ago, when he moderated a conversation with Jon and me. I’m a longtime admirer of his work, and it was such a thrill to meet him and speak to him, and even more so to leave our conversation feeling like it was all an elaborate excuse for us to become friends. Below you’ll find his essay, “Le Petit Écolier,” which he originally published in his newsletter, Accept Cookies. In it, he wrestles with the notion of perfection—and what might happen if we let it go.

Sending love,

Suleika

Some items of note—

• If you missed last week’s meeting of the Hatch, our monthly creative gathering for paid subscribers, we’ve posted a replay! In it, Carmen reflected on joy as a revolutionary act and a righting of the scales, read a poem by Ross Gay, and shared a prompt to help us cultivate some glimmers of light and hope. Find it here!

• On April 21, 2025, at 7pm ET, I’ll be hosting a very special virtual workshop to celebrate the publication of my new book, The Book of Alchemy! To reserve a spot, just pre-order your copy, then register at the link below.

Prompt 323. Le Petit Écolier by Hrishikesh Hirway

In school, I studied photography. The photography department at my college emphasized conceptual rigor much more than technique; it didn’t matter that much if your photos weren’t perfectly made if you had a compelling reason for why they shouldn’t be.

You had to present your work and the ideas behind it in bi-weekly critiques (or “crits” for short) where you pinned your photos to the wall, talked about what you were trying to achieve, then fielded questions from the professor, the TA, and your fellow students. I loved crits. Sometimes college felt abstract or distant or theoretical, but crits felt like a concentrated pellet of education. I had to learn how to think about my own work and how to talk about it while watching my peers figure out how to do the same. It was an exercise in expressing your own artistic intention, and years later, that became the basis for my podcast Song Exploder.

The other reason I loved crits is because usually we’d all bring in snacks. There was a Dunkin Donuts around the corner from the art building, so I’d usually bring Munchkins. It made the crits feel communal and fun, and combined the highbrow art talk with the feeling of a sixth-grade birthday party.

One day, on the long metal folding table at the front of the class where we’d gather our snacks, I saw a box of cookies. I grew up eating Chips Ahoy! and Keebler Fudge Stripes; cookies that you could find at any grocery store—cookies with an elf in a funny hat on the front or with an exclamation point in the name, cookies that came in a plastic sleeve, not a box. But this was a box, and the dimensions were elegant. It was a long rectangle, black, with a red stripe just on the left side, like the spine on a Japanese import CD. (I had also just learned about Japanese import CDs, and how they often had extra tracks and rare B-sides that weren’t on standard-issue American CDs. So cool.)

On the front of the box, in understated letters, it said, “Le Petit Écolier.” There was an image of the cookie itself: a rectangular butter cookie with a slab of chocolate on it, with a picture of the titular French schoolboy embossed on the chocolate. It looked like a decadent and delicious playing card. Things were just as fancy inside the box. The contents were divided into two neat silver foil packets. The foil split easily with a slight tug, revealing six cookies inside.

I examined one. The butter cookie on the bottom was really a biscuit. Not too sweet, with a tight texture that held its shape and had a little snap. And on top of that—my god, it was just a solid piece of dark chocolate. Forget chocolate chips or chunks or anything that coy. It was like a small, expensive candy bar that had its own biscuit to carry it around. I bit into it. It was perfect.

There’s that saying (maybe it’s from Voltaire?)—“perfect is the enemy of good.” I had a hard time coming to terms with that idea. Growing up, I liked school, and I thought I was good at it because I would sometimes get 100s on my tests—a perfect score. Perfect was good. If I got an A- on something, that evil little hyphen proclaiming less than a perfect score, my parents would encourage me to study harder, do better. Perfection was easy to recognize. It was quantifiable. There were rules, which meant you could learn the rules, which meant you could find your way to a perfect destination.

College blew up that idea. It blew up so many of my long-held ideas. Standing in front of my photographs in my first crits, as I failed to articulate why my correctly exposed and well-composed photos were interesting, I slowly realized what I was being asked: What did this work have to do with me? With the way that I saw the world? Perfection wasn’t just beside the point, it wasn’t a part of the vocabulary. I was supposed to be reaching for something that was true about me, and expressing that in a photograph.

I don’t know what the creative intentions were with the Petit Écolier. It was invented in the 19th century by the Lefevre-Utile company. But over a century after that, and years after my first bite in the basement of the Art + Architecture building, I still stand by my first impression of that cookie. Maybe the debate here is if cookies are an art form or not, but what’s not debatable for me is the perfection of these cookies in particular. I don’t always or exclusively want to eat Petit Écoliers, but that doesn’t change the fact that each bite of one is a perfect bite—a balance of two different sweetnesses and richnesses, a balance of the gentle snap of the biscuit and the soft yield of the dark chocolate.

I asked my TA, who had brought those cookies into class, where she had found them. She said the name of a store that I vaguely recognized as a fancy little market down the street. I’d never paid attention to it, let alone gone inside, because it was so fancy that my small town suburban brain didn’t even register it. But one week, before a crit, I forwent the Munchkins and made my way inside the bougie bodega. It wasn’t organized like the big grocery stores I knew. I couldn’t find anything. Eventually I had to give up and try to explain to the cashier what I was looking for. He gave me the directions, and I found my way to the shelf, and there they were.

Letting go of perfection is still something I struggle with. However, I know perfectionism isn’t just futile. It can keep you from making something genuine, heartfelt, and full of humanity.

And yet, I still find perfection in the world, like the little schoolboy: Dark chocolate. Biscuit. Exclamation point.

Your prompt for the week:

They say that perfect is the enemy of good. Write about perfectionism. Is it something you struggle with? Was there a time you wrestled free of it? What happened—or what could happen—when you let go?

If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

Today’s Contributor—

Hrishikesh Hirway is a singer and songwriter and the host and creator of Song Exploder, an award-winning podcast and Netflix series about the creative process behind songs. He’s released four albums of his own music, as well as composed original scores for film and television. Most recently, he wrote the music for the film Companion, which is out now. Hrishikesh also co-hosts the podcasts Home Cooking with chef Samin Nosrat and The West Wing Weekly with actor Joshua Malina. For occasional missives from Hrishikesh, sign up for his newsletter Accept Cookies.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Consider the Lilies, an essay where I reflect on the siren call of productivity and how I’ve refined and even redefined my definition of success

• On Failure, an excerpt of my Studio Visit with my husband Jon Batiste, where we talked about “getting your rejection in,” creativity as a muscle, and how if you’re not failing, you’re not really trying—and he also shared his mom’s red beans recipe!

• A Confession, where I wrote about lapsing in a creative project, reflected on the trap of all-or-nothing thinking, and shared a practice I use to give myself grace and get back back on track

Pre-order The Book of Alchemy

“A stellar guide that’s sure to spark the imagination.” —Publisher’s Weekly

The Book of Alchemy exists because of this community—because of the five years we’ve spent exploring the alchemical properties of journaling together. Pre-orders are so important for authors, and it would mean the world to me if you would consider getting yours in today!