“Success comes from persistently improving and inventing. Not persistently doing what is not working.” Derek Sivers
Failure is not trying.
We cannot control results and outcomes.
We can control our lizard brain that tells us to do what is safe and risk nothing.
Changing nothing will limit our success more than “persistently doing what is not working“.
How this helped me?
I wrote this quote on the whiteboard in our software test lab at the software company that I run. We were struggling with selling a particular product and as we reviewed the results I realized it was not going to get any better. No amount of elbow grease or rally cry speech from the front of the boat was going to help.
It is easier to assume or conclude that something else is to blame than the business model, product, price, people, etc. Direction and vision are supposed to be created by really smart people, so it must be brilliant? Wrong.
Since I was the same guy to blame for the business model, we blew it up with a stack of TNT and as a result launched our SaaS (Software-As-A-Service) offering.
Within one week, we had changed course and within one month we had a completely different positive result. Eight months later we are now doing a substantial % of our business with this new product offering.
If it were not for listening to Derek’s book driving into work that day. We would probably still be on a death march hoping that it would get easier over the next hill.
Derek Sivers book Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur. He started Code baby a website that enabled non-record label musicians to post their music for sale. Derek was one of the first to create the now common place “buy now” button.
What should you stop doing today that simply isn’t working?
