Today’s brain teaser:

Can you think of an activity that…

#1. Can’t be unlearned.

#2. Does not require understanding how it works to be proficient at.

#3. Is easy to teach by demonstrating, but impossible to teach by simply talking about.

If you said sex, I’m going to give you partial credit.

But no, the answer I am looking for is riding a bicycle.

Once mastered, it’s known by you forever. But no matter how good you become at doing it, you can’t transfer that knowledge to another person verbally. Each of us had to learn through personal experience.

The biggest question I have on this topic is what would prompt anyone who came up with the idea in the first place to ever imagine it would work?

After all, it makes no intuitive sense to think you could straddle this thing, and by barely holding on and with little conscious effort, maintain your balance for long periods of time.

(Just to be clear, I’m no longer talking about sex here, just bicycling. But your point is well taken.)

And yet someone, at some point, had to build a bicycle, jump on, and despite no doubt falling multiple times, ignore the laughter of their neighbors and (I assume) ridicule of their father-in-law, and think, “Sooner or later, this just might work.”

As it turns out, this type of hunch-based trial and error is nothing like my past experience as an employee of a large, well-established company. You were a small part of a big machine.

Proposed concepts, unconventional or not, required a detailed explanation and reasonable expectation of success … before the fact.

Bring up your idea in the next staff meeting about “a two-wheeled mode of self-powered transportation on which people will miraculously learn to keep their balance,” and you may as well save security the trouble and escort yourself to the door right now.

Crazy was not encouraged, let alone rewarded.

Working for yourself, on the other hand, is a completely different ballgame.

For people like us in particular – small professional service firms and solos – not only is the cost of experimentation exceedingly low, but it’s a reliable (if not straightforward) way to uncover good ideas and fine-tune your business sweet spot in the process.

We Need to Invent More Bicycles

You’re going to find this hard to believe, but my path to Nobel-Prize-worthy heights of success (alas, they have yet to create one of these for the email newsletter) was riddled with wrong turns and failed projects.

There was the “PenguinScore,” a rating system for writing that was modeled after the Apgar Score and that was lauded by approximately nobody.

There was the “newsletter factory,” a service targeted to the construction and building trade. I still laugh about it with the founder of a local building company who, at the time, gave me about 900 reasons why it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.

And, in the pantheon of my failed ideas, there was the one-day, on-site, marketing bootcamp. I booked the venue, wrote the marketing copy, and proceeded to share it with the world. Total registrants? Zero.

I could go on.

But the fact is, with these experiences and many others like them, I learned a little more, expanded the scope of my relationships, and, maybe most important, was able to deduct the cost increased my resistance to failure.

Not to say failing is enjoyable. But it helps us get used to the idea that it’s built into the process. The more things we try, the sooner we uncover the ideas that actually work.

Give my best to your father-in-law.

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Extra Credit:

In exactly 10 words, one of which must be “bicycle,”
summarize today’s newsletter.
(Extra extra credit if it rhymes.)

Share your answers below…