[su_quote cite=”Charles Kettering”]99 percent of success is built on failure.[/su_quote]
This quote about the formula for success makes a regular appearance in images on both Twitter and Facebook. It’s popular among the entrepreneurial crowd, most likely because it’s validating.
It’s validating because those of us who run businesses are all too familiar with how much failure shit we have to deal with on our way to achieving financial freedom (which is the ultimate marker of success no matter how some people try to spin it as something more lofty than mere greenbacks in the bank. Who are they kidding? Never having to worry about money again is The Entrepreneurial Holy Grail!)
Here’s how that validation works mathematically for a typical entrepreneur these days:
[su_note]If 99 percent of success is built on failure, then only one percent of success is built on success, which means that if an entrepreneur works an average of 70 hours a week on business, then you can count on failing for 69 hours and 15 minutes and succeeding for a mere 45 minutes every week which means that really, all the stress, worry and guilt about wasting time watching funny YouTube videos or cruising Facebook when you could be making phone calls to key decision makers is futile. Because since failure is a given for the majority of your working life, why not embrace all the things that fall into the failure category and see them not as adversarial, but rather as advantageous?[/su_note]
In short, the formula for success gives you permission to horse around, one of the fastest (and most fun!) ways to failure.
The technical math term at work here is called “dependent probability.” It can be explained nicely with the following marbles in a bag example.
[su_note note_color=”#1ff3f9″]1 blue marble (success) is placed in a bag with 99 red marbles (failure). What are the chances of getting a blue marble?
1 in 100.
But after taking one out, the chances change.
If you pick out a red marble, now the chances of getting a blue marble is 1 in 99.
If you pick out the blue marble, then you are either extremely lucky or you have x-ray vision which makes me question why you are hustling to build a business at all when you could have copied the formula for Coca-Cola a long time ago and made a fortune with it overseas.[/su_note]
And since one squared always equals one, there is no chance of ever increasing your success factor since it’s only one percent of this formula anyway. So why bother?
Just keep watching funny YouTube videos and posting random quotes on Twitter. It’s akin to reaching into the bag and pulling out red marbles. The blue one’s in there somewhere. I promise.
