Failure = Feedback

Don't Give Up! Those failures are lessons

by Michael Stevenson, June 2007

Recently, in a software marketing forum, a member said that he was leaving the group because the software he'd been trying to sell had been "a total failure". Mike Stevenson wrote an excellent reply, pretty much a mini-essay on success. He gave me permission to share it with my newsletter readers - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.   -Editor

Interestingly enough, when most successful entrepreneurs (meaning billionaires) are studied, there are some striking similarities. First, they are more likely to leap first before looking, because they realize that experience is the mother of all teachers. They make very quick calculated decisions - they make sure they aren't going to ruin themselves big-time, but short of that, they just leap.

Second, these ultra-successful people like Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Tony Robbins associate themselves to their successes, but treat failures as "only feedback." In their world (and even in their language, for the most part) the word "failure" does not exist. Everything is about learning, adapting, improving and moving on.

There is a famous quote from Thomas Edison which has been so bastardized that I don't think anyone knows the real quote anymore. But essentially, it took Edison many, many times to create the lightbulb. The figure reported these days is 10,000 tries. When interviewed for a newspaper article, Edison was asked something along the lines of, "You tried 9,999 times to create a lightbulb and failed. How did you continue to persevere through such depressing results?" to which Edison replied, "I didn't fail, I just found 9,999 ways NOT to make a lightbulb."

Edison also thought that most who were not successful, were unsuccessful because they gave up just before they would have had a breakthrough.

All that being said, there is some real trash software out there making lots of money. It's not always (actually, usually not) about the software. I have learned over the years that being a shareware / software author is more about marketing than anything else. Perhaps some study into that area will help bring you more success.