By Mark Lait
Google has had a success rate of about 1% for the successful products they have bought to the market, that means that around 99 times out of a hundred, the things they have tried, failed and they stopped doing them. Can you imagine how much it costs for their development teams to create, test and launch these ‘sure things’ and then they don’t work, or don’t work as expected … but they don’t stop trying – and neither should you.
Don’t stop what you are already doing, but start taking your first steps, and I’m talking about those calculated risks which will add to what you already have – as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is any sustainable business.
Unless you already have the funds to grow your business you’ll need to keep doing what you are already doing and build your success incrementally – it really is the tortoise and the hare.
I’ve developed a set of instructions to help you with this incremental build, things that you can do one at a time so that it doesn’t seem so overwhelming. This system is what we use to maintain a 7 figure income.
Failure is not a bad thing, imagine there were several gifts on a table, inside one of them is a prize called Success. You can choose only one at a time. So, as you’re unwrapping the gift you chose, you find that there are several layers of wrapping paper, you don’t know how many and each one that doesn’t reveal the prize is a failure, but you know that the prize is under one of them, so you keep peeling off layer after layer or – failure after failure and each time you peel off a layer, it costs you money.
Some people get the prize after peeling off one layer – that’s called life, some people win some people lose. Some of the ones that lose, won’t go back to the table and choose another gift, they will walk away and say ‘oh well, I tried’ and they are right, they did try, but only once.
Yes, it costs money but money always comes back, opportunity and time never do – never.
Google has killed off 149 products in its 21-year history, now when you think about Google, you think of a search engine, maps and possibly Gmail, I know there are more successful products but they’re the few that spring to mind, so more than 20 years for a scorecard of 3/149 – how would you like that on your school report. The point is, they just don’t stop trying – it’s that kind of thinking which led to their spectacular success.
Failure can be your friend because when you try something and fail, you learn what not to do next time.
A lot of people see opportunities as scams, thanks to the internet … I know there’s been plenty and we’ve all been affected by them, I had someone working for me once who clicked on a link in an email thinking it was someone’s resume and the result was a crypto locker virus that cost me thousands to get fixed. We ground to a halt, we couldn’t access our customers, we didn’t know who was coming in that day, all the financial records were locked up and it was very scary.
I didn’t shut my business down when that happened, I got up, dusted myself off and carried on. I learnt what not to do next time, I created a process for it and now all of my staff know what to do if they see something like this again.
A lot of people are unwilling to deal with stressful situations like this and if they get hit once, they then consider that everything is a scam, and that kind of thinking will keep them exactly where they are for the rest of their lives, they won’t take those calculated risks and make those incremental changes because they’re afraid it mightn’t work.
If you don’t see that failure can be your friend you will never grow and if you think that all the good opportunities are gone, that they’ve already been taken then you’re right; they are – for you, but they’re not for others.
If they didn’t do what had already been done, Google and Facebook would not exist, and just on that point, Google was the 17th search engine on the market, not the first – so why would they do that when it had already been done? They saw an opportunity to be different and started trying and failing which ultimately lead to their spectacular success.
We make money from photography because we know how-to, we’ve learnt from the failures and I’m sure there will be plenty more, but if we hadn’t started, we never would have known whether we could have.
Failure can be your friend, so go out there and try something new!
Mark Lait,
Director of Freedom Photography Group & Make Money From Photography Coaching
Check out the instruction book at www.makemoneyfromphotography.com.au and make sure you subscribe to this channel and ring the bell to stay up to date with what’s going on.