I went to design school at one of the most well renown schools of Design in the country. We learned a lot in a very compressed amount of time, and I was consis

I went to design school at one of the most well renown schools of Design in the country. We learned a lot in a very compressed amount of time, and I was consistently impressed with the raw intelligence of my colleagues. But the single thing that I noticed differentiated people who were break-out "all stars" were people who weren't afraid to fail and kept pushing boundaries week after week of crits (critiques). Learning how to give and take critique is an essential part of any sort of creative process, but the prerequisite to evaluation and refinement is the act of raw creation. A favorite story of mine from a product design professor: An elementary school pottery class was split into two groups. The first group was told that they'd be graded on the volume of the ceramic pots they created. The second group was told they'd be graded on the sheer aesthetic qualities of only one ceramic pot throughout the course of the semester. Semester after semester, the 1st group (graded on volume) would inevitably have the most aesthetically pleasing ceramic pot in the group. Iterating and more importantly, having the right mindset to learn from those iterations is pivotal to succeeding.