I started 19 businesses before I found success.
The 20th business made me my first million.
I never understood failure.
You don’t need to be delusionally optimistic, have superhuman determination, or believe you can make anything—even the worst businesses—work if you work hard enough.
You just need to never stop adjusting your approach.
Failure isn’t real
Failure is defined as the absence of a desirable outcome.
What are you trying to accomplish?
To build a growing, profitable, stable business, perhaps.
If failure is the absence of a desirable outcome, when you first start your business, you’ve already failed.
You haven’t achieved your outcome—you just started!
The next day, still a failure.
One year later, even though the business has grown from $0 to hundreds of thousands of dollars in soon-to-be-profitable revenue, still a failure.
What if you pivot from that business to another, bigger, more promising opportunity along the way that makes you millions?
That first business didn’t work. Who cares?
You still got your desired outcome.
Because you didn’t stop.
How to never fail
If you never stop adjusting your approach, you can never fail.
If you drilled down into my actual first 19 businesses, you’d see that most were iterations of previous ideas. I was experimenting.
- Wholesaling
- Dropshipping
- Exact match keyword domains to sell products
- Domain flipping
- Ecommerce website design (the worst business by far)
- Private-labeling
- Fitness mobile apps
- Muscle-building information product
- Weight loss information product
- Giant health supplement online store with 90 brands and 11,000 products
- Creating my first brand of private-labeled products
- Creating multiple private-label supplement brands and selling them on Amazon
- Teaching people how to private-label and sell on Amazon
- Creating software to sell on Amazon
90% of the “businesses” were within one limited liability company (LLC).
I didn’t fail 19 times. I experimented 20 times until I succeeded.
My goal was to build wealth while doing what I enjoyed.
As long as I never stopped learning and adjusting my approach, failure wasn’t possible.
How to eliminate failure
Don’t stop.
No matter what.
Our needs are universal:
- Health
- Wealth
- Good relationships
- Purpose
If one of those areas is lacking, keep working at it.
Iterate. Pivot. Adjust.
Until successful.
Simple. Trite. Slightly annoying.
Yes.
But still true.
A few shortcuts
- Learn everything (read, listen, talk with experts)
- Model those who have already done what you want to do
- Get into environments with people who have done what you want to do
- Maintain slack in your life so you can persist (spend less than you earn, keep your schedule more open, don’t overcommit)
You can achieve almost anything you want.
As long as you never fail.
Because failure isn’t real.
If you never stop.
—Matt