by Odahh
9 replies
Say 20 years ago you wanted to be a writer .. to eventually be a successful write .. you had to faildozens .. hundreds or thousands of times after you wrote part or all of your book ... because you had to fail at getting your pook published with publisher after publisher .. until one said yes .. had you make a few changes ..signed you up to write so many books for them .. and they published your book .. then you had to go on book tours or do what ever .. many many times sitting waiting for someone to buy your book to sign it ..

this was over generalized but it's an example ..

Then the long tail of self publishing came in and you could get a book published on your own put it in amazon .. and keep a certain stock with them ..and sell books but still many books don't sell that many copies and sometimes on demand printing can be bad quality ..and you really hoped you could get published by a publisher..who would take over that part for you ..

now today you can skip printing books.. and if you write a book you can publish it for e readers .. but say your still kind of fail.. and your write a book and manage to only sell 100 copies a month for say 2.99 -what ever the fees to list it are ..so lets say it makes you 200 dollars a month in the end ..

oh man your a failure ..do you give up ?

or do you leave it there think that wasn't my hit but .. you right another one and put it up.. but again only sell 100 copies a month ..and another one ...and only sell 105 copies a month of that ..then another at the same rate ...then you get to about ten books .. and your getting better .. maybe 150 sales a month.. so overal your making 3k a month ..

now you may be able to devote more time to writing.. put up a facebook page .. blog .. whatever works for you .. and you keep writing getting no hits .. but you continue to sell more books each new book and the new buyers even buy your older books ..and you slowly build a fan base ..who give you feed back to help you get better ..

but say you cap out at an average of 200 sales a month per book a 2 income ..so about 2500 books a year or $5000 ..per ebook ..but lets say every year you are publishing 10 books .. never having a hit and never selling to many more than 200 units a month per book ..

how much of a failure would you be after 10 years ...

there is one dirty secret about most highly successfull people.. unless the failure banruted them.. they learned the lesson and forgot about it ..

long term success requires failing over and over and over until you get things right ..or go bankrupt ..but there is knowing when your drilling a dry hole ..
#failure
  • Profile picture of the author Jakro
    Wonder how this spot on article has not gotten much attention? It's exactly right - you can't skip the process to success, you have to take the failures and the bruises that come with it.

    Slow gradual improvement over failures is always more certain way to succeed than trying easy push-button solutions over and over again.

    But of course that won't appeal to the unthinking masses!
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  • Profile picture of the author Christopherlhk
    A lot of things in life are not really failures but rather lessons. It just boils down to how we perceive the lessons that the universe is teaching us.
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  • Profile picture of the author maskmirror
    I like the title of your posting 'Be a failure'...maybe that's scared off some people, but I think knowing how to be a failure is essential in knowing how to be successful. I can't think of a single successful person whose road to success wasn't paved with failure.

    They say 90-95% of IM'ers fail. Have no idea how to verify that statistic, but it seems plausible, only right now I'm using two different meanings of the word 'fail':

    1. Fail = to fail
    2. Fail = to quit

    The 90-95% that fail don't actually fail. They quit. Technically, IM isn't something you can fail at. It's like writing. The moment you take a pen or a laptop and you start writing down words, you are a writer. A failed writer is not someone who writes bad books. It's someone who stopped writing.

    I'd take it a bit further: if you manage to be successful without ever failing, you're not successful. Why? Because if success comes easy, you're not challenging yourself to discover your full potential. This is actually why I decided to go into IM. I was 'successful' in my 9-5 office job, in the sense that I didn't fail at it, but I didn't feel I was achieving anything either.

    I read of a guy who did an experiment once: he tried to fail at something at least once a day. He would set very high goals for him to achieve, or he would try to get rejected by chatting it up with a girl in a club somewhere. He learned two things:

    1. Failing at something was harder than he thought
    2. The world doesn't end when you fail. Rather, it opens up to you
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  • Profile picture of the author Odahh
    when studing successful people or those who have made it.. there is a bit of survivor bias ..as there are probably many peopl who do what that person did.. but at one point or another the failure was large enough for them not to make it..

    the difference between a great hitter and the who are just really good.. is that the great hitter fails slightly less often than the really good hitter ..

    football..it rather rare that teams give up and walk out of the stadium ..because they had to punt the ball ..
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    • Profile picture of the author dardar
      Well said Jakco.

      You will fail, but try not to let it become a habit.

      Some people cannot except failure,of any kind.
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      • Profile picture of the author joefizz
        Edison failed 10,000 times before he found a solution. If he'd listened to society and his friends...he would have stopped long before and ultimately the 'light bulb crown' would now belong to someone else!

        We should teach failure to children in school...along with persistence and The Law of Attraction... my 2 cents anyway... :p

        Llwyddiant!

        Joe
        Signature
        I am an Internet Marketing coach. Accelerate your performance here:
        FREE RESOURCES to help you...

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        • Profile picture of the author seriousmny
          Great post. I found out that the only way a person is going to have something in this world is to earn it. You cannot count on anyone else but yourself when it comes to increasing your own bank account numbers. Inheritances and winning the lotto don't happen for everyone and I'm not going to get rich by sitting and just dreaming about it.

          Creating small goals for myself and not giving up when I was frustrated has enabled me to move forward and tick off some of my needs and wants. Learning how to make money online has not been easy, but I finally made headway when I realized I had the shiny object syndrome and stopped purchasing products and started implementing the ones I already had.

          Just by doing that, I have made great gains this year. By the end of the year, I plan on seeing better numbers than last year with my websites and my business. I have failed numerous times, more than I would like to admit, but deep within my heart is a burning desire to be a success for myself and for my family and that is what drives me.

          I learned I could not count on my 9-to-5 job after being laid of twice in the span of 10 years time. Companies are just not loyal to you anymore or care about your financial situation. I had take the responsibility of my financial future and create something for myself and something to pass on to my child. I'm failing to win.

          Winners never quit. Quitters never win. Let's all get our piece of the pie.
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  • Profile picture of the author contentwriting360
    Banned
    If we may share our thoughts on this, please. We strongly believe that there's no such thing as 'failure.' If a man does not get a thing, that means it's not for him; for there's something far better and even greater 'thing' allotted for him. According to the law of empirical science, there's no such thing or object like 'failure.' Simply, humans use this word to describe the postponement of success.


    -Andrew
    Customer Service Representative
    Content Writing 360° - Writing Services
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  • Profile picture of the author Delton Doucet
    You never truly fail unless you quit...failing is just a learning curve in finding out what didn't work and taking that knowledge and trying another method...repeating the process until you do find what works...
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  • Profile picture of the author qlanfoq
    Banned
    [DELETED]
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