Nobody ever tells me they’ve got an excuse. They’ve always got a reason.
I hear them all the time from people in business. And so often, when you look closely, the reason is just an excuse. Usually an excuse with a bit of blame attached.
Benjamin Franklin caught himself doing exactly this as a teenager. On his first voyage from Boston, the ship was becalmed off Block Island and the crew started catching cod. Franklin had given up eating meat, fish included. He’d decided that killing every fish was “a kind of unprovoked murder”.
Trouble was, he’d always loved fish, and when it came hot out of the frying pan it smelt “admirably well”. He also remembered that when the cod were cut open, smaller fish had been taken out of their stomachs. “If you eat one another,” he thought, “I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So he had cod for dinner.
So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Chapter IV, First Visit to Boston
He’s laughing at himself. The fish smelt good first, and the reason turned up afterwards.
Is it true?
I love the work of Byron Katie on this. Her method starts with a belief and two simple questions. “Is it true?” And “Can you absolutely know that it’s true?” Later on, she has you turn the belief around to its opposite. You look for ways the opposite could be just as true.
What if you started asking those questions about the things that get in the way in your business right now?
Take the idea you’ve had for ages that’s never got any further than an idea. Usually there’s a belief stopping you from even testing it. I was asked about ideas like that in an interview at the LA Tribune Leadership Summit, and my answer was short. “How much are those million dollar ideas worth while they’re just ideas? Zero. Nothing.”
The cheapest, quickest way to fail
So turn it around. Suppose the opposite is true, and it’s a brilliant idea. What’s the cheapest, quickest way you could fail and find out?
What I mean by that is a test that risks almost nothing. If it flops, the downside is tiny. If you were wrong about it and it turns out to be a big success, you win. That’s what this is all about for me.
If the word “fail” still makes you flinch, I’ve written about why failure is just research.
The email test nobody meant to run
I had this recently with a business owner I coach. They were worried that if they sent too many emails to their marketing list, people would unsubscribe and stop wanting to hear from them.
Then they ran a campaign and forgot to switch off their normal keep-warm emails, the regular ones that keep a list in touch between campaigns. Without meaning to, they doubled the number of emails going out to their prospects and clients.
It made no noticeable difference to their unsubscribe rate. And those emails were still being opened and read.
The belief that had been holding them back was wrong, and they only found out by accident. Sometimes our assumptions are the very things standing in the way. It takes a bit of bravery to test them and try something different.
Which of your reasons would you be brave enough to test?
