UFYL: Failure – It Will Happen
This post is an excerpt of Unf*ck Your Life, a series available to SEO Revolution and The Game Plan members. To access the entirety of this Unf*ck Your Life series, as well as a complete and regularly updated arsenal of SEO how-to’s, tools and best practices (with a little grey hat fun thrown in for the adventurous), choose a membership: SEO Revolution or The Game Plan. Enjoy!
I love football.
No really. I love football.
I bleed Silver and Black, the colors of the Raiders. While they showed a resurgence in 2016, they regressed in 2017 and fired their coach. For the last 20 years or so they have sucked. And that’s being conservative.
Stick with me; it will be worth it.
This picture is taken on a dark day as a Raider fan. I still stay inside all day on this date because I think something terrible will happen if I go out. No seriously, I do. Someone stop me.
The Date: January 5, 1986
The Raiders were heavy favorites to go to the Super Bowl that year. Marcus Allen, Howie Long, Lester Hayes (pictured), Mike Haynes, and the list goes on. The Raiders never made it out of the divisional round of the playoffs, losing to the Patriots 27-20…despite scoring 20 points in the first half.
Yeah, that’s right, getting shut out in the second half. You don’t win many games doing that.
This was a failure of epic proportions, and the team started on a downward spiral.
Failure is going to happen to you. This doesn’t mean you follow the advice of my former college roommate who said,
“I’m going to fail in business multiple times because Abraham Lincoln failed in business multiple times and he became President of the United States.”
Either someone dropped him, ate paint chips, or lived near power lines as a kid. That’s irrational thinking.
Failure is a part of the process. You figure out what works and what doesn’t. Don’t fall into the trap of being a projectionist. Don’t make your project perfect. Launch it 75% completed. Those who buy and complain it isn’t finished, give them something extra and deliver. But if it completely bombs? At least you didn’t waste your time completing the last 25%.
Get the point?
Good.
Failure is okay. Edison said he figured out hundreds of ways NOT to make a light bulb work. You will figure out many ways NOT to drive effective traffic to Facebook. It is called experience, which is a topic for another day.
Until then. Don’t be afraid to fail. You are figuring out what DOESN’T work. Once you find out what does work, fine tune in into a process.
And THAT is where success comes from.
Don’t believe me? Maybe you’ll listen to Steve Jobs then…
https://youtu.be/E6CeAv6kwVM
