In the Industrial Age, failure was expensive. Any activity involved material stuff, capital and sweat. You could not fail too often or you would become broke.
Today in the Collaborative Age, failure is free. All it costs is some effort and learning.
The Fourth Revolution website cost me 10$ to setup – the cost of securing the domain name. All the rest is free including the hosting. It will remain so until I decide that this initiative is worthwhile, well received, and it is worth investing a bit more money in improving the service for its followers.
If the initiative does not work, then I’ll shut it down and the only thing it will have cost me is my time. And actually I will have learned so much from the experiment that that’s more an investment than a cost.
20 years ago, to pass my message across, I would have had to write a book or newspaper article, try to find a kind publisher who would have looked at my background and decided whether he would take the risk.
So, failure is not only free today, but it is an opportunity. We can go quickly through failure cycles, learning in the process until we find the right product, idea, message.
We still don’t embrace systematically free failure because of our Industrial Age mindset. And because of our fear.
We often read about improving a little bit every day so that the compound improvement gets significant.
When will you decide to fail once a day so that the compound investment and opportunity becomes significant?
