I love making mistakes

They’re good for you One of the worst things that can happen to someone running a business, in life, in general, is to be successful early on and to have a lucky first round. I see this with a lot of online businesses, who will create a landing page or a squeeze page or a set of like ads or whatever. And they'll just knock it out the park and it'll do really well. And that's good because evidently they've listened to the teachings and they've made some good choices and they've made some smart decisions. But then they struggle to replicate it later on. And the reason they struggle to replicate it is because they're trying to replicate success rather than trying to correct a mistake. If you have a dozen different options available to you and you happen to choose the right one on your first go then. Great. But the danger, of course, is that you then expect that result every single time. The reason I think mistakes are good is because mistakes are where you learn. Again, sounds obvious. And there is a period in our life when we are very small children, where we are expected to make mistakes. Going even further than that, there's a period in our life when we are encouraged to make mistakes. When you're learning to walk, you fall down and then you get back up when you're learning to eat. When you're learning to talk, when you're learning a new language, there are all these parts of the process where you make mistakes and that's good. It's encouraged. Most of the time, I think at least. And then there comes a point at school where you are graded against the level of mistakes that you make. The concept of the standardized test means that you're given a hundred questions. And if you get a hundred correct, you'll get a 100%. And the problem with that is that it ingrains in us that there is a "perfect methodology" to doing something. Obviously, for certain things like facts and figures and your multiplication tables and maths, there are of course correct ways for doing things. However, the fundamental problem this brings up is that if at the start of the year I get 50% correct, and at the end of the year get 75% correct. I am still marked lower than someone who can do 90% of the correct answers at the start of the year and only 92% of the answers at the end of the year. Progressive learning is measured by the standard at which the results are set, not the standard at which the person taking the exam has improved. There are of course no perfect exams. There's no such thing as a perfect method of measuring the progress of someone. And to be honest, I want someone who is doing heart operations on me or brain operation on me, to have gone through that academic process. Of course, it's not always about progress. However, what a standardized exam like that does is it tends to set the expectation in us as children that going forward our job is to try and get things as perfect as possible. And if we're not going to get it perfect, then just don't try because we'll either be punished or down marked or downgraded or looked down on if we don't get a perfect score. If you start exercising and you do it badly and you do a bad job and you. Which is ultimately what a lot of exercise is. You run your first mile, it takes you 15 minutes and the next time you do it, it takes you 14 minutes and 50 seconds. And then the next time you do it, it takes you 14 minutes and 40 seconds. And you keep dropping it down by 10 seconds. Each increment that's considered progress, but whether we like it or not, that is making a series of mistakes in our 15 minutes. And then we make fewer mistakes the second mile, and then we make fewer mistakes in that the third model and so on and so forth. And it's the same in our business. If we're not measuring where we are now, it's impossible to measure how far we've grown. A really common problem that we find is around December time, entrepreneurs and business owners think "I'm exactly the same place I was last year. I haven't made any progress. I'm sick and tired of this. I haven't improved. I haven't grown. I'm not making the money I want." And what that is typically a sign that they are measuring themselves against their peers and colleagues compared to measuring where they are compared to where they were, a year ago. That was a really important lesson to me last year, was actually looking at how much money we made and we doubled our revenue. In fact, we more than doubled our revenue and it was a big shock to me because I was like "yeah, but I'm not making the money I want." True. You're not making the money you want. You haven't got a hundred percent yet on the test, but you have progressed from 50 to 75. Personally, I believe that mistakes are about progression. Have courage, commit, and take action. Mike Mike Killen Sell Your Service Sent to: {EMAIL} [Unsubscribe]( Sell Your Service Ltd., The Generator, Kings Warf, Exeter Quay, Exeter, EX2 4AN, United Kingdom