Why Failure and Experimentation Lead to Success

The rule is that nothing works. Nothing works the first time, and sometimes it doesn't work the first five times or ten times.

A young man went to the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson Sr., and asked him, "What can I do to be more successful faster?" And Watson said, "It's simple.

If you want to increase your success, you must double your rate of failure.

You must fail more often and faster." He said, "Success lies on the far side of failure."

So you don't sit there and say, "Which of these should I do?"

You pick the one that's the most logical, and you do it.

And you get feedback, and you learn, and you try it again, over and over.

Almost every person who has been successful financially has spent anywhere from fifteen to twenty years of experimentation before they finally hit the formula that enabled them to earn a lot of money.

Self-made billionaires in a recent study had been in their field for fifteen years, working an average of ten or twelve hours a day before they found the right combination of circumstances, products, people, money, and market demand that led to them becoming wealthy.

So be prepared to make a lot of mistakes and try a lot of things.