Spending money to learn what you don’t want is a good investment. Ideal outcome? No! But the time saved is worth it!
A quick example: someone over the course of an intensive group coaching program to make a membership realizes they don’t want to have a membership!1 Sucks that it cost a lot of money to figure that out, but that’s infinitely cheaper than spending years trying to make something work that they didn’t want. The pressure to take action encouraged them to clarify their relationship to the membership model, and they can now confidently put it aside and focus on the work that they’re most excited about. While they did not get the result they initially wanted, they have both developed their business skills and know what they actually desire.
We tend to think of these as expensive mistakes rather than valuable learning opportunities. But how are you supposed to know what you want until you try it?
It’s like the stereotype of people who say they want to be writers but have never tried to write. The writing is the thing; if you’ve never done it you don’t know if you like it, and certainly don’t know if you like it enough to try to become good at it.
Business can be the same. Entrepreneurs are the heralded creative class of our time,2 and it has become a coveted status. Certain business models in particular get a shine, like those with recurring revenue, or scalable products without much overhead, or running a weekly paid newsletter, or drop shipping (lol).
The shiny model isn’t necessarily the right one for you, though. How much time are you willing to lose trying to figure it out?
It may feel counterintuitive, but I believe that it is worth investing in programs and experiences that accelerate the learning curve in our businesses, even when those learnings show us that we don’t want the thing. While the upfront financial cost may be high, the time saved by learning that you don’t want this and can move on with your life is worth it.
I’ve certainly done it. My most expensive so-called mistakes have been related to hiring, and I’ve certainly paid to learn that I don’t want something. My clients have, too, sometimes even with me. I’ve also seen clients learn that expensive softwares were not for them, or even entire degree programs. All of these things cost money, and we naturally want them to work out, whatever that means. We pile a lot of stress on ourselves to get it right and not make bad investments. We judge ourselves and blame others when it doesn’t turn out exactly as we had hoped. 3 We don’t want to feel like we made a bad choice.
But at least we made a choice.
This is in part what is meant by “fail fast,” the popular StartupLand idiom. The benefit to failing fast is that it 1) implies that you actually tried and 2) should mean that you learned how not to do something or learned something you don’t want to do, both in contrast to 1) doing nothing and 2) not learning anything.
Developing a bias towards learning experience is a skill I think more founders need, and is one that almost all successful ones that I know have. The investment then doesn’t always need to be money, though for busy entrepreneurs it often is. I am not suggesting that we should spend what we don’t have in order to “fail fast,” but that we must stop assuming that all investments that don’t lead to the specific outcome we anticipated are failures.
We can make this a quick, conscious action:
- Identify: What have you been dithering on? Are you kinda convinced that if you had great SEO your business would take off? Are you, like me, pretty sure you’d be a genius jewelry designer if you only knew how to, uh, make things out of metal? Notice the thing. It’s probably something that you keep pushing forward on your to-do list, or that comes up when you talk to your biz friends or your coach, a thing that you have a hypothesis about but haven’t tested.
- Commit: Get yourself engaged with the thing, on the hook as it were. Find a course, buy the supplies, hire the person. You don’t have to go to the extreme (no need to book a yearlong SEO contract when someone can do a few tweaks that you can evaluate after six months), but you need to pick something that has high enough stakes for you to follow through.
- Test: See what happens. Did you almost immediately stop attending the group calls for your no-code course? Did you absolutely love learning how to drop ship (lol)? Did you get the clarity on how to get the result? Or the clarity that this isn’t for you?
It’s easy in business to spend too much time making decisions, too much time mapping and remapping, too much time visioning and not enough time acting. A course, coaching program, hire, or other experience that accelerates the decision is inherently worthwhile because it saves you time. And that’s the one thing you truly cannot get back.