 If you want to succeed in business, you have to keep going. That's the only way to succeed because to become successful means you have learned so many lessons to become really excellent in your field. And to become excellent in your field means that you have inevitably experienced a lot of failures. And that's what I'm gonna talk about in this video. The premise is there is no failure. There is only redirection. You are being redirected by your audience to try something else. You're being redirected by your market to offer another product or service. You're being redirected by life to try another method for going where you wanna go. There is no failure. There's only redirection. And one of the models in history to teach us that is, of course, Thomas Edison. And I wanna tell you two quick stories about him. One story, and these are all true. This one came from one of his interviews when he was creating the light bulb. And you may have heard this before, but this is an actual quote from him. This is from Thomas Edison here. I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with creating the electric light. Each one of those theories seemed reasonable and apparently true. But only in two of those 3,000 cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. Okay. Two out of 3,000 became what created the light bulb that we know that has changed history and changed billions of people's lives. So how many experiments are you willing to do? Have you recently launched a service? Have you recently announced an event? Did you recently launch a book? Did you recently try to announce a webinar or a product? And it did it fail? Okay, that was one experiment. How many more are you willing to do? Okay. The problem with experiments and failures, of course, is that it's discouraging, isn't it? Well, why is it discouraging? It's discouraging because you had the expectation that it was supposed to work. What if you instead had the expectation that it's probably not gonna work, but I'm gonna do it for feedback and to see what happens, what I can learn from doing this launch or making this post or sharing this product. I'm gonna see or contacting this person. I'm gonna see what happens. Now, sometimes you are lucky enough, right? And one out of 3,000 chances or one out of 100, you'll succeed and that's great. And then celebrate that and learn from what seemed to have worked. But more times than not, maybe sometimes you get negative feedback and from the negative feedback you can learn to say, huh, now that person felt negative about it, is that person a good representative of my ideal clients? If it's not a good representative of your ideal clients, don't listen to them. But if they are actually a representative of your ideal client pool, then you should listen to their negative feedback and improve on it. But I'll tell you, the vast majority of the time, the problem is you don't get any feedback. Isn't that right? You put something out there, crickets. Crickets, silence. You don't hear anything, right? That's the hardest piece of feedback to take, but that's the most common piece of feedback to take, especially on social media. You post a video out there, you post a thing out there, you don't get any likes, you don't get any comments, right? I experienced that for years before I got to this point where thank you for those of you who are actually live here with me, Nick Ward, Vicknes Vary, Jason Stein, thank you. But that didn't happen for years, but I kept going, okay? The hardest feedback is lack of feedback, but lack of feedback is also feedback. Do you hear me? The lack of feedback equals feedback from your market, from your audience, from your life, saying, oh, okay, that was okay. Try something else now. That's what life is telling you when you get lack of feedback. Try something else. Do another thing. Try something different. Let me tell you one more story from Thomas Edison. And this was when he was working on creating a storage battery, which by the way, I didn't know this until I did the research. The storage battery actually created more wealth for Thomas Edison than the light bulb, okay? So when he was trying to create the storage battery, one of Thomas Edison's colleagues said this, and this is a quote from his colleague, I learned that Edison had thus made over 9,000 experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. 9,000 experiments and not a single thing that solved the question, right? Okay, the quote goes on to say, in view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment. And I said to Thomas Edison, isn't it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work that you have done, that you haven't been able to get any results? Edison turned on me like a flash and with a smile, he replied, results? Why? I have gotten a lot of results. I now know several thousand things that won't work. That's what Thomas Edison said, is a quote from his colleague. So what about you? Are you on your third launch? Okay, great, keep going. I have been doing content now consistently since 2014. And if you ever find any of my videos from 2014, it's thankfully kind of buried now. That's the great thing about the internet. I have to tell you this. If you just keep pumping out content out there, just keep putting content out, your mediocre stuff, your bad stuff will get buried because people can't find it because you have all those new content that's being pushed up there. That's the truth. So you can't find this, but I'll tell you that in 2014, I made a video where literally during the video, I was desperate and I said, why isn't anybody liking this? Why don't you, nobody cares about me? What's going on here? I literally said that during a video in 2014. I kept going. I kept going. Nobody was liking my videos. Nobody was commenting on it. For 2014, 2015, I got maybe a few likes per video. Okay, it was a year later. I was just getting a few likes per video. 2016, I got a few more, 2017, now 2018. Four years later, thank you everyone for all of your support and love. I'll cheer her, thank you for joining live as well. So you got to keep going. Same thing with your launches. I've had lots of products and services and packages and one-on-one coaching and group programs that fell flat. Nobody signed up, not a single person signed up for some of my offerings, not a single person. Even last year, last year, 2017, which was almost 10 years into my business, okay? I launched a program and I have thousands of subscribers, email subscribers, thousands of Facebook fans and I put this thing out there and I really tried to launch it. Two people signed up. Two people out of thousands of loyal fans and subscribers and followers, two new people signed up. That was last year, almost 10 years into doing lots of experiments, being like a Thomas Edison, trying lots of different things. So I had to cancel the program. That was last year, I tried hard. It was gonna be really, so I still fail all the time. Are you willing to fail? There is no failure. There is only redirection, okay? So in the comments, in the notes of this video, I'm gonna put a blog post that I wrote in relation to this video that gives you several things you can test in your business and several things if you keep doing it, will make your tests easier, okay? So with that, I'm gonna end this video and I'm just gonna encourage you. Remember Thomas Edison, remember all of the success entrepreneurs, men and women, people of all races, ethnicities, genders and everybody who has succeeded really in any field, not just in entrepreneurship, in sports, in music, in art, in parenting, right? Of any field has failed lots of times. You've got to learn to love the journey. And by the way, my cat's jumping around my desk. That's why it's shaking. You've got to learn to love the journey. And by loving the journey means to take a curiosity, attitude of curiosity and attitude of wow, everything I'm doing is benefiting my growth. How beautiful is that? How wonderful is that? And I get to learn to reframe every less than positive experience as a learning and growth opportunity. So with that, keep experimenting in your content, in your offers, in your launches, in your contacts with potential clients, keep on going. Be well.