Failures and hits.

Stop me if I told you this one before.

No?

Ok, so here goes.

In the halcyon days of the dot-com boom I was shooting three spots in what would eventually become a very popular campaign.

The campaign was the second the client had produced. The first was an abject failure. I was brought in to make things right.

We were shooting and all of us on the set had that giddy feeling that things were going right and we could have something pretty cool on our hands.

I was standing with my boss when the client came over.

"I think we have a hit," he said in his oleaginous way.

"Yes, we just may," said my boss.

"It's too bad we had that failure in the first round of spots."

I'll never forget what my boss said.

"If we didn't have that failure, we wouldn't be here now."

That shut the client the fuck up.

Which, by the way, is always a good thing to do.