Here\’s a confession…
Not every idea I\’ve had has been golden.
In fact, I can say that many of the business ideas I\’ve tried have managed to bring me… well, let\’s just say something was funding one or two lunches per week.
That\’s one of the advantages of marketing. Everyone gets to know about your successes but your failures just fade away.
But I don\’t regret any one of those bad ideas. That\’s not just because they showed me what wasn\’t working, and not just because each failure moved me one step closer to the killer idea that would make money. Both of those things are true but they\’re not what make little failures so important to success.
I don\’t regret them because they were inevitable.
I still set aside time regularly to sit with my staff and brainstorm. We toss out ideas, laugh at the crazy ones, get enthusiastic about some thoughts before dropping them and always come out of each session with a list of projects that we\’re sure are going to have the money pouring in.
And yet we also prepared for the fact that not all of them are going to work.
We\’ve done the first thing that\’s necessary for business success: we\’ve set aside time to experiment.
It\’s important to me to always be trying new things. I like to do things that others have not done before. And why not? There\’s so much that remains to be done!
Instead of focusing only on what we know works, we\’re always looking for new paths, new strategies and new ways of generating revenue. If you want to keep moving forward, that\’s vital.
The second thing needed to succeed though is to understand that success doesn\’t happen all the time.
If we try ten ideas and one works, that\’s good enough. We\’ll have had fun with the other nine and we\’ll still have made money.
We didn\’t give up at the first sign of a bad idea and that\’s vital too.
But perhaps most important of all when you\’re trying new ideas is to be able to recognize failure when you see it.
Experimenting is fun, and it\’s essential, but tossing good marketing time and money after a project that won\’t take off is just bad business.
If you experiment, you have to be prepared to fail. And if you\’re prepared to fail, you have to be able to spot that failure… and keep replacing it until you find the idea that succeeds.
Then you try to find another one.