“Winning Isn’t Everything But Losing Is Nothing” – Part 1
I probably heard the first quote from my mother when I first played under 8’s basketball. I heard the second quote from Mutant League Football on my Sega Megadrive when I was 12.
The first thing it is worth noting about any competition is that there are automatically winners and losers. In all but the most unlikely of circumstances you will end up with one label or the other. For those of you unhappy with labels there is only one option – life on the sidelines. In all likelihood working for the man, in either that depressingly massive bureaucracy – the government or a Dilbert Cube.
Unfortunately most of us feel that losing is nothing. It can be especially when you don’t learn anything or it’s not part a of deliberate strategy to win overall.
The hardest trophy to win in all professional sports is the Stanley Cup in the NHL. You play for best of 7 series, after completing a gruelling 82 game season just to make the finals. The commentators are fond of saying you have to win 16 games of hockey to win Lord Stanley’s Cup.
What never gets mentioned is that you can lose another 12 and still win – a 57% win rate. Wow! Those odds are hardly better than a coin flip. In this case a 7% edge over ‘chance’ and you become a grand champion – bathed in glory – your name etched on the cup along with every other person to have ever won it!
That’s what I mean about a deliberate strategy. One where the losses are factored in and accounted for as part of your plan for success. Not everything we’ve done here at Newsletter Marketing has been successful. Personally we can both share our share of hard luck stories. However when we’ve risked, we have risked small but the rewards have been comparatively massive.
We stack risk: reward in our favour!
So we can have lots of small losses and still come out ahead.
- Which means we don’t need that many winners to win.
- We keep using our winners until they no longer work – maximising our win.
We’ve been using a handful of control ads to do our lead generation in rotation for over 2 years now. They work like clockwork – month in month out they profitably bring in new customers. It took a few goes to get it right but I couldn’t even begin to calculate the value of those winners to Newsletter Marketing.
Most people get stuck in the winning and losing is personal trap. I win means I am a winner. I lose means I am a loser. It means they have never see the big picture – success just doesn’t even mean winning more than losing. For many people it means when they win, they win so big that it cancels out all the losses and then keeps paying them.
It’s not whether you win or lose but how big you win and being able to stay in the game long enough to actually win. When you see the bigger picture the losses are just part of the bigger game.