Sometimes the most successful things happen by accident.
The only way to maximise your chances of success by accident is to do more stuff and get more stuff wrong. Sometimes in the midst of getting stuff wrong, something goes right.
At the recent lecture by Seth Godin that I attended, he suggests that sometimes he writes fifteen blog posts a day and publishes one; he gets fourteen dramatically wrong before he gets one right. Some of the ones he publishes are truly terrible but the majority of them are really good because he is producing so much copy that he is bound to produce some good stuff. He described this example of a similar phenomenon in his lecture (although he used it for another reason)
Those of you who are old enough will remember the Alka-Seltzer advert 'plop, plop, fizz'. Two Alka-Seltzer tablets were dropped into water and the water fizzed up. The person drank the water and felt better. Up until then people had only used one Alka-Seltzer tablet in each cup; by pure accident Alka-Seltzer doubled their sales with 'plop, plop, fizz'.
We all need a bit of luck at times. Sometimes in the art of just grafting away and getting things wrong a path to the next thing that's right opens up.
Blog Post Number: 774
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