Not selling isn’t the failure, not shipping is

If you launch a product that doesn’t sell, does that count as a failure?

That depends on what your intentions are when you start. If you’re living in the world of win or lose, black or white, good or bad, then yes, not selling equals failing. You had a project that didn’t perform its expected action, and so, by definition, it’s not a success.

On the other hand, let’s say your intention is learning, growing and positioning. Doing as many experiments as you can to increase your leverage and affect your opportunities and benefits down the road. In that case, failure is neither here nor there.

Not that selling a product isn’t a worthwhile gain. Even in a market that seems daunting and anxiety provoking, everyone should at least give their work the chance to ring the register.

But in a world where the alternative is not launching at all, the fact that your product now exists makes you the winner. You’ve already beaten the odds, since most people get scared and stop.

And this is not an insignificant victory. One of my consulting colleagues has a related mantra about writing books. He launches a new title roughly about every four months, and his contemporaries in the industry often accuse him of advocating for mediocrity. But he responds with the line:

My crap is better than your nothing.

Isn’t that a fascinating way of looking at success? Because in his mind, not selling isn’t failure, not shipping is.

His strategy is to keep the bookshelves of his clients full of products with his name on it. He knows they want to do business with people who are doing things, not thinking about doing things.

Whereas too many people and businesses are obsessed with finding the right project before they launch.

It’s a lot of ready aim, ready aim, ready aim, but very little firing. They only want to put their best foot forward, but they end up putting no foot forward, and simply standing in place while the rest of the world rushes by.

That’s not where progress, wisdom or growth comes from.

Carlin famously joked that he never slept with a ten, but one night, he did sleep with five twos. That joke always killed me. It’s a crude way to think about the business, but in my experience, the skills you build from playing, and the perspective you gain from reflecting on the game, are more important than winning.

You just need to put some numbers up on the board. Twos, fives, or otherwise.

How many new things have you shipped in the past ninety days? If you never sold any of them, would they still create enough value for you and your team to be worth it?

Edison comes to my mind, who was famously asked by a reporter how it felt to fail one thousand times. He responded by saying, the light bulb was simply an invention with one thousand steps.

Starting today, view all business as a series of experiments, and do so relentlessly until you find a formula that works.

Keep shipping, keep beating the odds by not stopping, and you’ll keep positively affecting your opportunities and benefits down the road.

How could you redefine wining a world where the alternative is doing nothing?