Today is September 12 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is "Have you learned that failure will not slay you?"
Serendipity, adapting, perseverance, collaboration, and creativity were five strategies that helped Christopher Meledandri make the small, yellow creatures known as the minions.
It was serendipitous that Meledandri’s parents adopted a child-rearing technique popular where parents treated their children like adults so he never saw any cartoons or animated movies. A month before graduating college his father died and Meledandri had to attend to his father’s affairs.
He took a job as a gofer in Hollywood for one of his father’s friends, producer Dan Melnick, and learned to adapt and opened himself up to learning as much as possible even though the work was often mundane. Meledandri eventually worked on a major studio project entitled Titan A.E. that lost $100 million and almost cost him his job. “It was one of the hardest periods of my adult life.”
The film’s collapse taught him a valuable lesson. “Prior to Titan I went through life believing that a major professional failure would destroy me. I learned that while it came close to destroying me, I survived it and I no longer had that conviction that failure would slay me.”
Meledandri recalls he was persona non grata on the Fox lot in the immediate aftermath of the failure of “Titan A.E.” But one person who stuck with him was Peter Chernin, the head of Fox’s entertainment division at the time, who opted to give the executive a second chance.
“Failures can be unbelievably valuable opportunities, with the proviso that the person has to be introspective and thoughtful enough to learn from them,” says Chernin.
Meledandri would eventually to on to launch a very successful animation company Illumination Studios.
Have you learned that failure will not slay you?