Everyone makes mistakes. It’s a fact of life. Every company makes mistakes, too. Are the companies that make mistakes the ones that fail? Only if they keep making the same mistakes.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I think whoever came up with that definition must have been in advertising. Too many brands try the same thing year after year and seem surprised that they lose ground to their competitors.
It’s easy to spend too much time worrying about making mistakes, especially in this business. We can get caught up in over planning, over thinking and over talking—not to necessarily ensure more success but to minimize the risk of our mistakes.
But the annals of business history are filled with business mistakes that led to huge profits—from the invention of rubber to the now ubiquitous Post-It note.
When asked about his invention of the light bulb, Thomas Edison is widely reported to have said that his first failed attempts weren’t failures at all, he simply discovered 10,000 ways that wouldn’t work.
In the end, people don’t remember the mistake, they remember how you deal with it, what you learn from it and what you make of it.
If you’re not making new mistakes, you’re not innovating. You’re not pushing the envelope. You’re not doing anything new. In other words, you’re becoming a commodity.
You need to learn to budget for mistakes. If you’re making new ones and not the same ones, they are an investment, not a liability.
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