Someone here asked a great question about success and failure: How do you know when to quit?
As I said in my earlier post, I’ve failed at 9 out of 10 business adventures. I have an actual running list of my successes (3 notables) and failures (30). On my list of successes, I’m excluding such things as the Dilbert.com web site, my speaking career, and the millions of Dilbert calendars because they are a direct result of my one success with Dilbert.
When I was a commercial lender at a bank, we often heard the rule-of-thumb that 1 out of 10 businesses succeed. I doubt there was much science behind that number, but it seems about right if you exclude franchise businesses that almost always make money.
My failures were mostly things for which I was entirely qualified. What killed me each time was bad luck, usually in the form of bad timing. For example, my best ever idea was patentable, and would have been worth more than anything I’ve done with Dilbert. I know it was patentable because someone patented it just ahead of me.
My two corporate careers – banking and telecommunications – also suffered from bad timing. I left the bank because my boss told me that she couldn’t promote a white male. At the time, the media was giving the company a lot of bad press about having no diversity in management. I gave up on my telecommunications job when my boss at Pacific Bell later told me exactly the same thing. It was an awkward little window in history where reverse discrimination got out of control. Had I been born five years earlier or five years later I would have missed that window. I’m not complaining, since that’s the disgruntlement that led directly to Dilbert. I’m just providing it as context. Luck – typically in the form of timing – is usually the dominant factor in success. You usually have to try a bunch of things before luck has an opportunity to find you.
So how do you know when to bail out of a losing idea?
I heard a useful rule about predicting success during my (failed) attempt at creating a hit Dilbert animated TV show. While watching the Dilbert pilot being tested on a focus group, an experienced executive explained to me the most non-intuitive way to predict success. Since then I’ve observed it to be true a number of times. It goes like this:
If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed.
Think about that for a minute before I explain why everyone liking something predicts failure. If you get this answer right, I’m guessing that you are already successful yourself. Tell me in the comments if I’m right about that.
The reason that a product “everyone likes” will fail is because no one “loves” it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it. For example, I’m willing to bet that when the TV show Baywatch was tested, 90% of the people rolled their eyes and gave it a thumbs down. But I’ll bet 10% of the test audience had tents in their pants. Bingo.
Dilbert was the same way. From the very beginning, the vast majority of people who saw it didn’t care for it. But 10% who saw it not only liked it, they cut it out and mailed it to friends. They talked about it. They hung it on walls. They were passionate about it. Before the first Dilbert reprint book was sold, I heard stories of people making their own Dilbert books from newspaper clippings. Bingo.
So if you invent a new type of umbrella, for example, and every person who sees it says “that is clearly better than all other umbrellas on the market” then you have nothing. Walk away. But if someone who barely knows you demands to buy six of them for everyone in his family, and doesn’t first ask the price, and is willing to drive to your house to pick them up, then you might have something. Great ideas catch on immediately, and passionately, at least with the early adopters.
If you plan to try 10 things, knowing 9 will fail, do things that won’t kill you in the process. I prefer challenges where the worst case scenario is that I’m embarrassed or tired, as opposed to bankrupt or dead. And I prefer challenges where the upside potential is unlimited even if unlikely. But those are personal choices. I find it easy to shrug off failure, so failing 90% of the time works for me. Your mileage may vary.