“I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” — Thomas Edison
Regardless of the particular people you aim to serve or the types of problems you aim to solve, it remains true for all endeavors that some actions done even with the best of preparation and intentions won’t work as planned:
The marketing campaign that falls on deaf ears.
The prototype of a solution that doesn’t appear to actually be solving anything.
The call with a customer that results in both parties having more questions than answers.
To be clear though, stuff not working has nothing to do with failure because there is almost always a valuable lesson to be learned when something doesn’t work — about how to build a better marketing campaign, how to build a better and more functional prototype, or how to have better conversations.
Stuff not working is merely the natural part of an iterative process that involves you acquiring the learnings needed in order to be able to build things that successfully create change, solve problems, and ultimately help the people you aim to serve.
Progress is about realizing that there is always a zone between the territories of it's working! and other stuff that should be working but isn't. People like Musk/Bezos/Disney simply enjoy being in that zone because that's where invention is possible and they keep expanding the territory subsequently jumping into the newly drawn zone of it's not working.
Most of us lose momentum because we get addicted to feeling good about things that are working. Most of my conversations about