What if I'm wrong

My friend Chris Brogan is working furiously to finish his book, Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything (affiliate link), which you can already pre-order on Amazon. But what if he and his publisher are wrong and Google+ never takes off? Would that be the end of the world or would Chris find a way to turn that crisis into an opportunity? Success in business and life is as much about being wrong as it is about being right.

To be right, you have to be wrong sometimes

Being wrong is not that same as being a failure; not by a long shot. Brogan’s book doesn’t need to be a best seller to be a success. He could never sell a single copy and still it will be a great, well-written and useful book. Also, think about what Chris will have learned by writing his third book. You get better at your chosen work in life by doing it. To be a better writer, you need to write. To figure out what books people want to read, you probably have to write a few that don’t sell as well as your best sellers. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Learn to turn wrong into right

What if instead of beating yourself up for the most recent thing you’ve done wrong, you stopped and asked yourself: “How can I turn this into a positive?” For example, you overspent the first couple weeks of this month and now you’re short on cash until the end of the month. What would you do? You could use credit cards to fill the gap, dig into your savings or you could play my friend Randy Murray’s Spend Nothing Game. The right answer of course is to play the Spend Nothing Game. Playing the game will empower you with a new skill to help prevent the problem from occurring again.

So what if you are wrong? Will it send you into a bad mood for the rest of the day? Or will you find a way to turn the situation into a learning experience?

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