Learn to Fail Fast

I recently heard an interesting piece of business advice that really stuck with me. It stuck with me because it was something I always did, but I have just never heard it said like that.

That advice is “Learn to fail fast”.

Let me explain:


You are probably thinking “Why would I want to fail?”. No one wants to fail, but if you are going to fail you need to learn to do it quickly in order to get the data (results) that you can use to gradually improve.

No matter what you do, whether it is trying a new form of advertising or offering some kind of new deal. You need to get the results quickly so you know to either never do it again, or take what you learned and tweak it a little bit so that it does work.

A good example of this is Google Adwords. When you first setup Google Adwords advertising, you type in a bunch of computer related keywords that you hope customers will search for and after a few days, you will begin to see some results. Some of those keywords will work great, but the majority of them will probably work very poorly. Now you have the choice to either get rid of them completely, or see that they do have the potential to work well if you bid higher.
Even though the majority of them failed, at least you now have some data to go by.

I strongly believe that success is a series of failures. A huge amount of things didn’t work for me in my business. I spent a lot of money trying out various different forms of advertising that resulted no calls. However, gaining that information was invaluable because I simply learned what didnt work. After many advertising failures, a few little gems popped up that appeared worked well and as a result I increased my advertising in those areas trying similar variants.

After my first 6 months or so of advertising failures, I had weeded out the ineffective advertising and I was left with just about all of my advertising being effective.

I put my ads out, failed fast, analyzed the data, stopped doing what didn’t work and tried other forms of advertising until I found a winner. Learn to fail fast.