Failure Guaranteed
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Growing up, I would often go fishing with my best friend and his dad. When we would get to a lake, my friend’s dad would pick one lure and stick with it for most of the day. It always amazed us how he would catch more fish in an hour than we would catch in a day. While we would be changing our lures every 5 minutes trying to find the perfect one, he would just keep fishing the same lure. I was finally fed up with hours spent and zero fish to show, so I asked for his eternal wisdom. Slowly he looked over and told me, “you can only catch a fish when your lure is in the water.”
Life, in many ways, is similar to fishing. We are throwing our line out and hoping that something or someone bites. When our line is out for a while and nothing happens, we assume that we must have the wrong lure, so we change and try something new. However, we spend all of our time trying to make changes, and most often, we do so without any clue about what would work better. Sometimes, we already had the perfect lure, but the fish just wasn’t there—yet.
As much as I wish I could give a recipe for guaranteed success, I can’t. Luck and timing are always involved, and they are not entirely in our control. What I can offer instead is a piece of inversion thinking. Inversion thinking looks at a problem backward. For example, instead of trying to find what works, you identify what wouldn’t work. As problems become very complex, there can be an overwhelming amount of possible solutions. In these cases, it can often be helpful to find ways that clearly wouldn’t work.
With that mindset, instead of trying to find a way to guarantee success, let’s look at how to guarantee failure and then use that as a list to avoid.
Don’t stay consistent. Only do work when you feel inspired.
Although luck and timing play a role in success, some people appear luckier and have better timing than others. However, this is often not the case. Instead, the lucky people show up every day and are ready when the opportunity finally emerges. The unlucky people are typically the ones that don’t have their lure in the water. They are sitting with their rod in the boat, wishing the fish were biting.
Make massive pivots and constantly change without understanding why you should change.
We all hear the importance of pivoting in the business world, but this is no different than changing your fishing lure. If you spend all your time changing lures, you will catch nothing. So when you do pivot, make sure you are doing it for a well-understood reason and not just a hope and a prayer. Sometimes the success we gain comes from growing skills and learning what doesn’t work. Then we can take those skills and knowledge and go to a different lake.
Play the finite and not infinite game.
In his fantastic book, The Infinite Game , Simon Sinek explores the importance of making decisions that compound over time. Businesses need to act as if they plan to exist for a really long time because that almost always provides the best overall experience for the customer. However, suppose a business instead sacrifices its morals for the next quarter’s gains. In that case, eventually, those short-sided decisions will come due and leave the company worse off. As individuals, we are no different. If we cheat or scam, we may get away with it for a time, but eventually, we will get caught, and when that happens, we will lose our most important asset, our brand.
Ask for more from others than what you are worth.
Big companies are successful because they provide more value to their clients than they ask for in compensation, Amazon, for example. If they didn’t provide excess value, someone else would take their market share. For any of us to be successful, we must remember that. Of course, you might swindle a considerable purchase from a client once. Still, if you did not deliver at the minimum fair value for your price, they will never buy from you again, and they will tell their friends not to buy from you.
Summary
The above ideas are ways that will lead us away from success. By using inversion thinking we can invert the ideas and use their opposite to help guide us towards success.
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Stay consistent and show up everyday. Focus on the process and continuously do the best work you can. Eventually—when you are good enough— an opportunity will appear.
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Make changes to your plan only when you have insight and understanding for why you should change.
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Play the Infinite Game focusing on the long term and avoid sacrificing your brand for a quick cash reward.
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Provide far more value to your customers than they are paying you for. You can charge an insane amount, but as long as you deliver more value the customer will feel they got a deal and tell their friends how great you are.
Although success cannot be guaranteed, with a few guidelines it can become far more likely.
