Some pursuits just don’t work out as intended. The question is what to do next.
I think about Thomas Edison who is said to have had 5,000 – 10,000 failures on the way to improving the light bulb. Before him a light bulb lasted for only several hours. He eventually found a way to make it last a 100 times longer. I can imagine him saying to himself after many of his failures – “Well, okay. Then let’s try this.”
Here’s a recent example of what I tried but didn’t work. I’d been working on a project to expand my network of potential business partners using LinkedIn. I used LinkedIn’s search capability to discover some possible candidates for my network. I reached out to them. But almost everyone ignored my invitations and didn’t connect. I tried again. Same result.
I had two questions to answer. Was the project still worth pursuing? My answer was yes. The follow up question was whether to pivot and find a different approach to achieve the same networking objective or to try to improve the approach I had tried but hadn’t worked. I chose the latter, at least to start with.
I contacted some colleagues who are more proficient with LinkedIn than I am – to get their advice. We reviewed the message that I had been sending out. They said that my invitation to connect was too impersonal and pushy. Why not try a friendlier approach? I changed the message. It worked.
I mention this story to illustrate how important our attitude can be when confronting a challenge. I’ve been noticing lately how frequently things don’t turn out. If so, I pause and think of my action as an experiment that just didn’t work out as intended. So, like Edison, I can say, “Let’s try this again, but in a different way.”
What are some of your recent activities or projects that didn’t work out as you planned? If you think of them as experiments, how does that affect how you feel and what you do?