B (5:11)
When things go wrong. Here is a question to ask yourself. Did I just run an accidental experiment? The answer might be yes and once you realize this, you are going to feel a lot better because here's the thing mistakes suck. They make us feel empty, like there's a vacuum where there should have been a victory. But the accidental experiment idea completely reframes the experience. It gives you something to ponder and explore and learn from. I stumbled into this idea recently after something went wrong for me and it helped me immensely. I think it can help you too. So today I will share why it works, starting with my own big mistake. Alright, so about a month or so ago, I hosted a workshop for this newsletter community that I host. And the stakes felt really high because I wanted my members, my members who pay money to be part of this community. I wanted my members to be happy. And my friend Rochelle Devoe, she's a consumer psychology expert. Rachelle was doing me a huge favor by hosting this session with me. So got a lot of people, they're paying a lot of money, they have expectations, and I have a friend coming in and doing me a favor. That's the stakes. The call took place on Zoom, which is where I usually host these community calls. But when we all joined, Zoom told me that the call would be capped at 4:40 minutes. It said that right over the top, the 40 minute call, which was not good because I had scheduled this call for 60 minutes. I don't even know where the 40 minute thing came from. I'd never seen that before. I felt a panic. Why would this be, I wondered. Zoom's free accounts, I quickly learned, have a 40 minute cutoff. But that didn't make sense. I'm not on a free account. I'm on a paid account. But the group had to go. Things were moving. So Rochelle was speaking to the group and I was scrambling to solve this problem. I thought I had succeeded. I thought it was like a login issue or. And I told everybody that it was fixed, no problem. Everybody fix the 40 minute thing. We're all good. But then at 40 minutes, the call abruptly cut off. All my hard work, weeks of preparation, dozens of people, people who are paying to be there, and Rochelle, who had set aside time to do me a favor. All of it, poof, gone. Just gone. I felt a larger panic at that point. And then I did the only thing that I could think of, which was that I just re entered the Zoom room and to my relief, so did 90% of the group. They all just came back, even though I hadn't told them to. And then the call just carried on. After the call was done, I called Rachelle and I apologized for this whole mess. As I would later learn, the credit card that was on file at Zoom had expired and needed replacing, and that's the reason why it had defaulted back to a free account anyway. But Rachelle, when I called her to apologize, she said, no, no. She saw a great lesson in was like an accidental experiment. She told me when the call got cut off, you got to see how many people were truly engaged and willing to come back, and almost all of them did. That is very high retention. Rachelle Rochelle said, I laughed because it's true. I mean, I'm laughing now because it's true. And then I thought, oh, my God, what a brilliant way to learn from mistakes. Think about an accidental experiment like this. When something goes wrong, you get to see the results of something you would not have normally done. For example, let's say that I wanted to know how engaged people were on my Zoom calls. That's a hard thing to test because I don't know. I can think of three ways to do it. Number one, I could track how long they stay on the call, but also, I don't know if they're just bored and checking their email and I'm just seeing their face, but I don't know if they're engaged. So option number one, not great. Option number two, I could survey them after every call, but that's tedious and prone to error. So option number two, not great. Option number three, I could literally cut off the call in the middle and see who comes back. But no, I'm not going to do that. That's a terrible user experience. Oh, wait a second. It just happened. That sucks. But now I get to see the results. This actually is how some great scientific discoveries are made, by waiting for things to accidentally happen because we can't or ethically won't set them in motion ourselves. We don't harm people just to see how we can heal them, for example. But when mistakes are made and people are harmed, we have an opportunity to study our bodies and discover new cures. And here's an interesting thought that I found from a scientist ready if we do not test our own ideas to destruction, someone else will. That comes from a meteorologist named Mike Lockwood, who was writing to his fellow scientists in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences. He wants his peers to embrace errors because progress is nothing but the process of trial and error. He writes more. He writes, mistakes often bring to your attention new areas, techniques and theories that you had not realized were relevant and so drive lateral thinking and serendipitous discovery. Pretty interesting. And, you know, opportunities like this, they're all around you, for example. My friend Lauren King is starting a bagel business. It's called Cloud 9 Bagels. After making bagels at home for a while, she rented a space at a fancy commercial kitchen to see if she could increase her production. And on the first day there, she spent $145 making eight dozen bagels. Seemed good for a moment. And then she realized, wait a second. If she sold those bagels for normal bagel prices, she would earn about $145, which is exactly what she spent to make them. So with that, she put her kitchen membership on hold. My contentment about this startles me. She texted me when she told me about this, I should be more upset, right? And I responded, I actually think that this is excellent. It cost you $145 to see if the economics of this new arrangement worked. Better to do that now than spend thousands of dollars to discover the same lesson later. It was, I realized, an accidental experiment and money well spent. So much can go wrong. Our efforts can fail, our relationships can fracture, our time can be wasted, our egos can be bruised. But in each case, as we face the new challenges of the moment, it is worth asking, if this was an experiment, what is being tested and what was discovered? Because I'm telling you, something is being tested and some result was just found. Maybe you were laid off or a relationship fell apart. Maybe a product didn't work or a conversation didn't go well, or an idea didn't land. You had a hypothesis, something else happened instead. Now you are in uncharted territory, learning the things you didn't set out to learn. But those may be the best lessons of them all. As the scientists said, if we do not test our own ideas to destruction, someone else will. Let's be the first ones to fail to know what's on the other side of it. To learn the lesson quicker, to react to it faster, to have a solution to it sooner. To test our own resilience and the strength and commitment of others, to know what we're dealing with, to create what we want. That is an experiment worth running. And as you may know if you listen to Help Wanted. That was from my newsletter. It's called One Thing Better each Week. One way to be more successful and satisfied at work and build a career or company that you love. You can subscribe to it at onethingbetter Email. That's a web address. One thingbetter Email and. Or just stay tuned here to Help Wanted. Because I read these a few weeks after they come out right here on the podcast. All right, well, I guess my experiment now is to see if you like this, and we'll learn something together. Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason
