The Beauty of the Marketplace

The first time a person tries out a new idea, a new marketing approach, a new product, or even a new business, he or she will almost invariably fail. This is because whenever a person attempts to create a new value, unforeseen, disruptive variables occur as soon as that new value is injected into the competitive marketplace.

When studying the history of America's greatest entrepreneurs, in most cases each great entrepreneur got extremely excited about an idea or an invention, only to have it fail the first time out into the marketplace. But, in each such case, the entrepreneur studied that situation to learn what caused the failure, corrected mistakes, and then pushed forward. In fact, an underlying trait of all successful entrepreneurs is that they achieved success via learning from their mistakes. They did not achieve success via an initial "great idea."
Most individuals, at some point in time, come up with "great ideas." They get all excited about their ideas and envision success. But, when they first inject their ideas into the real world, they usually fail. The key is to understand that a person must work through the practical problems that the competitive marketplace throws up against new ideas. It is almost impossible for a new idea to work completely right the first time it is injected into the real-world marketplace.
People naturally become disappointed and demoralized when their new ideas don't work. But, it is at this point that a person must say, "I now have the rare opportunity to uncover my mistakes and correct them." That is the beauty of the marketplace. It allows people to uncover their mistakes and correct them. In other areas of life, such a mechanism seldom exists to reveal a person's mistakes. Outside of business, people can go through their entire lives making the same mistakes over and over again. Those mistakes can cost them dearly -- financially and emotionally. And they may never uncover those mistakes or uncover them only after many years.
Mistakes in business, on the other hand, can be positive events. Business mistakes make themselves obvious via their bottom-line results. A person then has the opportunity to roll up his sleeves and correct those mistakes. He can then go on to succeed. Outside of business, people do not have the opportunity to so clearly identify their mistakes and get rid of them. That is why those who exert consistent effort and persistency in business succeed so handsomely over time.