Is this a mistake? Let's find out
A couple weeks ago, my brother and I were talking about our careers and we realized we shared a common theme:
Each success was a follow-up to failure.
For each of us, most of the useful skills we've learned have come from doing something badly or the "wrong" way before doing it well.
You could call that a lightbulb moment... but only because Thomas Edison made so many mistakes himself!
He famously failed to create a working lightbulb over and over again, "wasting" time and resources on an "impossible" task.
When confronted with his failures, Thomas Edison famously retorted,
“I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
Do you see how he reframed failure as a form of success?
Each success is a follow-up to failure.
Expertise (or wisdom) is built on a mountain of mistakes—but am I making enough of them? 🤔
I want to make sure I'm making mistakes, so I've started a new "Experiments" space in Thrive School PRO to try things that might not work.
Here’s my first experiment:
💡 Idea: If I give away an ebook for free on Amazon, I’ll get momentum that will fuel future book sales
🔬 Test: I’ve published Always Be Teaching on Amazon, and it's currently FREE! This week only (starting today).
Background:
- I created an illustrated ebook called Always Be Teaching in 2021 just before I published my first book Survive and Thrive
- I published Survive and Thrive with a hybrid publisher (Morgan James) but decided to self-publish my next books
- I was worried about confusing people on which book was my “first” and which I was launching, so I sold Always Be Teaching as a PDF on my website and later as a free email magnet
- I’m writing Wisdom Into Wealth right now and want that launch to be my best one yet so I decided to test the self-publishing and promotion process with Always Be Teaching
- Because I’ve given away this ebook for free so many times, I’m reluctant to ask subscribers (like you) to pay for it, but I want to give the book an initial Amazon boost with reviews
- I enrolled the book in KDP Select which allows me to run one special promo every 90 days, and I decided to make the book free for 5 days (Monday - Friday this week)
- My plan is to get hundreds (thousands?) of downloads from subscribers (like you) which will lead the book to be featured in front of thousands of more readers
- Ideally, many of these new readers will become email subscribers or leave reviews!
👉 Get your FREE copy of Always Be Teaching on Amazon
I'll report back on my experiment, but I'd also encourage you to run your own experiments.
What will you try next, that might not work?