Why Failure Is Vital to Your Future

I spend every day failing (to one degree or another). My wife is, as you can imagine, very impressed – well she should be because failure is vital to success… When you think about internet marketing (and indeed almost anything in entrepreneurial life) you are off course for about 90% of the time. It’s the 10% of success we achieve that keeps us going. But why do we fail?

We fail in our marketing because we had an idea which didn’t work out:  We tested an approach which yielded a poor response.

This is normal.  Better than that, this is healthy.

A company which has few ideas to test is lacking in imagination.  (In fact, those that fail to fail ultimately become the real failures.) 

It’s not that you fail it’s whether you learn from it.  Failing is simply a result.  It’s not good or bad, just a result.  The key is to learn and not see it as a personal failure but to see it as one less failure you need to have en-route to your success.

This concept is at the very heart of good internet marketing. 

The internet gives us a unique opportunity to test several ideas at the same time.  For example you could split test pages on your website.  You could test multiple approaches to generating traffic.  You could test different sales email.  And you can do all this as part of one overall test because each test will feed into another. 

This, in itself, is a fascinating concept because it suggests that you can improve on each of the parts that make up your marketing in one go!  Plus the technology available to you now allows you to perform these tests simultaneously and that means you can get the results back in a fraction of the time a normal offline/conventional test would take. 

In other words you can fail faster than ever before.

Ok, tongue in cheek moment over… the bottom line is that when you test 10 ideas you give yourself 9 more opportunities to find a more profitable solution than if you had only tested 1.  To me that not only makes commercial sense but is also a great ‘boardroom argument’ against the naysayers who attack new ideas and approaches.

The simplicity of this is stunning: simply test your way to victory!

Here are some other notable failures:

• Bill Gates dropped out of University
• Einstein’s Maths Teacher said “Einstein you will never amount to anything”
• Walt Disney was a bankrupt
• 20 Centaury Fox dropped Marilyn Monroe because they said she was “unattractive and couldn’t  act”
• Beethoven’s music teacher said “as a composer, he is hopeless".
• Michael Jordon was cut from his high school basketball team
• The Beetles were turned down by the Decca recording company stating “We don’t like their sound, guitar music is on the way out”

As a failure, I’m in great company.