“Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.” – Bertolt Brecht, Born Feb. 10, 1898.
If you want to be seen as a leader in your market, it's not about always winning. It's about never losing.
Maybe the difference there isn’t obvious. In things like our work, it’s not win/lose. It’s not a binary. There are degrees of success. You can create contingencies. You can layer possibilities.
It’s not a loss if you create benefits for second place, third place, etc.
So if the primary goal is missed, you don’t “lose” – instead, you shift to plan B. Plan C. Etc. So that it may be a partial success that you can then leverage into something else.
Maybe even the seed of a future big win, informed by the “loss” – shaped by it and improved.
And if you can make a loss into a win, you'll pass up even the guys who seem to win constantly.
Why?
Because people don't know how to become the kind of person who never screws up and always succeeds.
It doesn’t seem real or possible. People who are so accustomed to success that they never need a backup plan? They are unrelatable, or else presumed to be lying.
No one has it that good, and if they do, you or I certainly couldn’t pull it off.
But if the audience can tune in regularly and yeah, see you win sometimes… but more importantly – see you turning a screw up into a leg up, that is do-able.
They can relate. They can picture themselves achieving that, because it’s only a couple of steps past the shortfalls they may have become accustomed to.
It’s just a change in perspective.
They can imagine themselves making farts into perfume, because they are halfway there, lol.