There is no failure, only redirection.

When I was in high school, I memorized a quote that has become deeply embedded in my being. I think it really has been one of the core reasons that I've been able to create a lot and find some success along the way. The quote is by Ralph Waldo Emerson and it goes like this. Do not be too timid or squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. So I memorized that quote and you may want to as well, because that quote is really the basis of successful entrepreneurship, successful self employment, right? Having a successful career. It's about the willingness to not see any failure, but to rather see it all as just a small part of your total journey of learning and experimentation and growth. So that's what I want to inspire you with today, is the idea to never consider anything to be a failure. To only see it as, oh, that was just one moment in the long journey of my growth. It's just one moment, whatever, however big so called the failure may be. And yes, sometimes it does impact us quite a bit emotionally and well, guess what? That's also an opportunity for us to practice our tools for working through difficult emotions and transforming them into something valuable for the future, for our holistic growth. All right, so I want to share with you one of the heroes of experimentation is Thomas Edison. He's well known for having done a lot of experimentations to discover the modern light bulb. And I want to read you a couple of quotes from him. So Thomas Edison said this. I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light. Each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true. Yet only in two cases out of the 3,000 did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. He wasn't a dumb person. None of us are. The fact that you're watching this, that you're thoughtful enough to watch a channel about authentic marketing, means that you're not a dumb person, you're a very thoughtful person. And probably more than that may sometimes get us into trouble, right? Being too stuck in our thoughts rather than action. Thomas Edison was obviously quite smart. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you could say that he was not very smart and just said, well, let me just. I think this might work. 3,000 2,998 failures. The things that didn't prove his theory, only two out of the 3,000 did. So how many experiments have you made? How many pieces of content have you, how many videos did you have you uploaded? How many articles have you published? How many products have you launched? How many coaching packages have you offered to your audience? If you're not yet at 30, that's not even 1% of what Thomas Edison had to go through to find the electric light bulb. Now you might say, well, it's a little different because when you're posting content or when you're launching an offer, that's more embarrassing, there's more sense of failure because other people are seeing you fail. And okay, that might be true, but here's the reality I've discovered after 11 years of marketing is that nobody will remember your mediocre things. Think about the well known musicians and artists and writers. Do we remember the fourth book they wrote that didn't go anywhere? Do we remember the eighth song on the fourth album that no one ever remembers? No, we remember their best selling hits. That's all we remember. So same thing with your audience. They are only going to remember your best selling hits. The things that were mediocre, they just scroll past it. That's just another experiment for you. That's it. Same thing. If you make an offer, oh, here's my coaching package that I put together. Anyone want to buy it? Nobody wants to buy it. They simply scrolled past that email or they read the email and they just closed it and they went on with their day. It's not interesting enough for them. It didn't prove your theory. Just like Einstein said he tried 3,000 times to prove his theory, two out of the 3,000 worked. So how many times have you offered different coaching packages? Have you offered three? Have you offered 30? Have you offered 300? You're getting a little bit closer to what Thomas Edison did. Let me read you another quote. When Thomas Edison was working on a storage battery, which actually ultimately made him more successful financially than even the light bulb. Okay, the storage battery. So when he was working on it, one of Edison's colleagues told the story. I learned that Edison had thus made over 9,000 experiments, 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 equation? Solved the question. In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment and I said, isn't it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work that you've done, you haven't been able to get any results? Edison turned on me like a flash and said with a smile, results? Why, man, I've gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work. I love that Playful spirit of experimentation that I hope all of us will allow to deeply sit into our system to say, oh, all life is an experiment. The more experiments the better. And I will add to that. Your audience will remember nothing about you except your best selling hits. So don't be shy, don't be shy. Post during the next video, write the next article. No one's going to care unless it actually makes a real impact on them. They won't care, okay? They won't even notice. They'll scroll past it because the few lines that they saw just wasn't relevant to them today. So they scroll past it and that's okay, that's a blessing. In fact, they opened your email, they didn't buy. They close it, they scroll past, they go to the next email. That's a blessing because that means you don't have to worry about trying the next one and the next one and the next one. So basically what I want you to take on is a rhythm of experiments. A rhythm of experiments. So I'll give you my example of my rhythm of experiments. Okay? So if you'll notice, at least at this time of this recording, I post a piece of content every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Monday and Thursday, these are articles. And Tuesdays and Fridays are videos. All right? So basically Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, that's four times a week I get to experiment with that next piece of content to see if it makes an impact, makes a difference for you. If not, please scroll on by because I don't want you to like my things just because you feel bad for me or you, you, you want to support me. That's very kind of you. I only want you to like something if you actually, if it actually made an impact for you. If you actually made a difference for you, that's the only time I want you to like it. Same thing with comments, right? I don't want to skew the data. I'm very serious about tracking the data for my content. So I want it to be accurate because why? I don't want you to like my things just because it might make me feel a little bit better. Because then, guess what? I'm getting more attached to your reactions when I should be more attached to the value of experimentation. I should be more attached to the spirit of playful experiments. That's what I should be attached. And I should be attached to the long term journey of my growth of which every piece of content is just a tiny, tiny drop in, you know that, that pond that makes a little bit of a ripple, a little Bit of ripple. A little bit of ripple. So again, four times a week I get to experiment with the next piece of content. What about you? How many times a week do you do it? Now? You don't have to do it four times a week. Especially if you have children to take care of or the elderly to take, or someone to take care of. You have a job. If you have other things going on in your life and you're not able to work on your business full time like I am, then, then you don't have to do four times a week, but try to do one time a week. One time a week is not too much to ask of you to post a piece of content. Especially again, if you take it from a playful, experimental attitude, then you don't have to be so stressed out. It's no pressure knowing that nobody cares. Even if you have a thousand fans, they're going to scroll on past unless somehow that topic is something that they actually are thinking about right now and are wanting to explore more. You just have to experiment. You will chance upon the topic one day that goes viral. And by going viral, I simply mean that it gets a lot more engagement, comments, likes, maybe even shares than most of your other things. That's what I mean by viral. It just does much better than most of your content. Most of your content is not going to do that. Well, most of my content doesn't do that. Well, you might say, well, George, most of your content gets at least a couple likes, maybe a couple dozen. It's all relative, right? Because my audience is big enough where If I get 10 likes on something, it's, it's relatively speaking, not no longer a big deal, but If I get 50 likes on something, now that's something to pay attention to. Same thing. When I first started with a small audience, I usually got no likes, no zero for everything. That's normal. No comments, no likes. But I just kept posting for a year, every day, every day. I did it for up until a hundred videos, 100 articles, and then after that I started doing it three times a week, et cetera. So three now, now it's four times a week. But really only one time a week out of the four is completely new. The other three times a week is repurposed. Anyway, long story short, back to your rhythm of experiments. I do four times a week. What about you? Please, please tell me you're going to do at least one time per week. Because if you do one time per week, and let's say you give yourself four weeks a year, off of content. Let's say eight weeks a year off of content. That means you only get 44 experiments a year to test out different topics, test out different ways of talking about something that you're interested in, that you're. That's within your wheelhouse. Only 44 ways. I get 160 ways a year because I do 40 weeks of content a year and four times anyway. So what is your rhythm of experimentation when it comes to content? First question. Second question is, what is your rhythm of experimentation when it comes to launches or selling? Making your offer. If you have a coaching program, are you only ever offering it one in one way? Your coaching can help a lot of people with different situations, right? Your service, your. Yeah, whatever service you provide, it's not only helping one person with one exact, very specific problem. You. You probably help one type of person with five different types of problems or help five different types of people with one type of problem. Whatever it is that you. You do in your service, do you only ever offer it, Only talk about it in one simple way? That's only one launch. That's only one offer. You need to take that one thing you do and learn to talk about it in five ways or 10 ways or 15 ways every single time you talk about it. Say, oh, I do life coaching for women to overcome overwhelm. That's one way. Okay, I do life coaching for women who are going through a particular emotional intensity moment in their relationship. That's the second way. I do what I call life coaching, which is basically asking you powerful questions and helping you reflect on how your relationship might be contributing to your feeling of stuckness in your whatever. I'm just saying that's a third way. You see what I mean? You have to try 5, 10, 15, 30 different ways of saying it's the same service. Did you just hear me say that's the same service? Life coaching for women with overwhelm or stuckness or whatever. But I just said it in three different ways, and I just came up with that in. In, you know, half a minute. And I don't even do life coaching for women. And, you know, so. So what about you? Whatever it is that you do, whatever service you provide, maybe you provide some kind of healing or some kind of facilitation of transformation, Whatever. You can say what you. The same thing that you do, it can be said in 30 different ways as part of your marketing. And when I say 30 different ways, I don't mean 30 different sales pages. I mean 30 different one to two to three paragraph posts. That's it. That's what I'm asking you to do every time you offer your service. Make it a 1, 2 or 3 paragraph Facebook post or Instagram post, or make it a five minute YouTube video or whatever it is. But this time say it differently than you did last time and see if people resonate. So I make my rhythm of experimentation is once a week on Wednesdays, as you'll notice, especially if you go follow me on my Facebook business page. That's where I do most of my content. On Wednesdays I experiment with selling something or pre selling something, meaning asking people feedback before I sell something because I want to know if it's going to work, if people are likely to be interested, how do they want me to talk about it. So every Wednesday you can see on my Facebook business page how I experiment with trying to sell you something. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But if I do it every Wednesday, that means I have again, I work about 40, 40 to 45 weeks in a year. So I get at least 40 experiments a year trying to sell something. And many of them are failures, but I just need a few of them to do well to make my whole year work. Now most of them do, you know, because now that I have so much experience doing experiments, I've done it for years. Now most of my experiments are okay, they make some sales, some of them do really well, and some of them don't barely sell anything at all. But that's the reality for every marketer, every business owner, every self employed person. No matter how smart you think you are, if you aren't continuing to experiment, you aren't continuing to learn. And if you continue to experiment, then you will always have some of those experiments not work at all. With Thomas Edison it was the vast majority of it. There is no failure, there's only redirection. It's simply life directing you to another experiment. Oh, try something else. Life is telling you when it's marketing people aren't buying. Your audience isn't saying, oh, we don't like you, we think you're terrible. No, not at all. Your audience is simply saying, oh, sorry, the way you're saying it today is not interesting. Can you try again tomorrow? Can you try again next week? Now I'm not saying you should sell something every day to your audience because that's probably too much selling, but once a week is certainly not too much to try another one, two or three paragraphs saying, hey, this is the way I want to describe what I offer today, right? Or this week. So there is no failure, only redirection. When, when your audience isn't buying or isn't engaging, it's simply your audience telling you, oh, hey, can you try something different tomorrow or next week? So I hope this is encouraging for you. I really look forward to your comments below. If you want to tell me how you're going to change or update your rhythm of experimentation, or maybe you already have a rhythm of experimentation that you really appreciate that you that that works for you. And if that's the case, please comment below and let me know. So, yes, that's, that's the my, my ask of you is to, is to, if you would like to now don't comment just because it's going to help this video go viral. No, but what I, what I'm really meaning is that if you watch this video but you don't do anything with it, that's, that's not the point. Right. My point is that hopefully you'll do something with that, this. So if you would like to, if it would be helpful to you, add a comment saying this is going to be my rhythm of experimentation going forward. So I hope this helps. And I want to thank those who are actually commenting live right now. I'm only able to see a couple of comments here. Thank you to Lori, to Marit, to Maruna. I'm probably mispronouncing your names. I know that there are other comments, but I'm not able to see it while I'm live here. But I will, I will look at it afterwards. Thank you for joining me for this. I'm George Kao, Authentic Business Coach. I'll see you in the next video. May you playfully persist in your experimentations. Take care of.