“Wait, blog’s not ready yet, I need to add this fancy plug-in to it. Another month, please.”
“Can’t start my list-building, I need to redesign my squeeze page and add follow-up emails to my auto responder. Another month, please.”
We are all too familiar when this happens. We tell ourselves that we are making things perfect and that it’s gonna be the best when it’s done. But deep inside, we know that’s not true. What we are doing is just…
Avoiding the possibility of Failure.
We’ve been brainwashed with the ‘boy wonder’ success stories, perpetrated by the media . You know, the typical tale of how a man/woman from a small town and without any [insert the field they excel at] background is able to be a champion in their chosen field. The media had used this storyline for Tiger Woods (when he won his first major championship at the age of 21), Steven Spielberg (when he made his first blockbuster movie), and so many other successful people that it’s hard to list them all.
And, we want to be this ‘boy wonder’.
The problem is, by trying to be them (perfect), we are not avoiding the possibility of failure. On the other hand, we are sabotaging ourselves from the possibility of success. Who ever guess Google will be this profitable by providing ‘free’ search engine service for the masses? Who knows Facebook will get this big when there are tons of other social networking sites competing for the same market? NOBODY.
Learning From The Giants
Both Google and Facebook founders believe in their respective products, long before it was launched. So, they do what they do and succeed. But, does that mean it could have gone the other way and fail? Of course. But, that doesn’t stop them from trying.
One thing that I find very useful to overcome the fear of failure is to think like software companies. Remember how long Gmail is in the beta phase? Google, one of the largest online company in the world, released an imperfect(beta) product before releasing its full version a year later.
Microsoft, one of the largest software company in the world, also did this by releasing the beta version of Windows 7 before launching the full version a few months later. The success of Gmail and Windows 7 is the result of continuous testing and tweaking at the beta phase of each products.
Putting It Into Practice
To put this concept into a more practical sense, every time I get into the pattern of negative what-ifs, I always answered them with “So what?”. “What if this fail?”, “What if people don’t like it?”, “What if the conversion rate of this page is not high?”. “So what? So what? and So what?” I can tweak it later. I can reset the project. And I can modify it to fit my readers’ expectation.
So, what can software companies teach you about success? Start today. Start blogging today. Start driving people to your squeeze page today. Then, if you are not satisfied with the outcome, tweak and modify them. Never be afraid of failure because you’ll always get the chance to fix it.
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