What Did You Learn When You Tried? | Morning Read
What Did You Learn When You Tried?
Friday, I asked a question:
What are you willing to try?
There’s another question that probably needs to come right behind it.
What did you learn when you tried it?
Because trying something isn’t valuable only when it works.
Sometimes the real value is that now you know something you didn’t know before.
That may sound obvious, but I think we sometimes put so much pressure on an idea to succeed that we forget one of the biggest reasons for trying it in the first place:
To learn.
Trying Gives You Information
You can think about an idea for a long time.
You can make lists.
You can talk it through.
You can imagine how customers might respond, how much time something might take or whether people will even care.
But eventually there are some things you can only learn by doing them.
Maybe people responded better than you expected.
Maybe nobody responded at all.
Maybe the part you thought would be difficult turned out to be easy.
Maybe the easy part turned out to be the problem.
Maybe you discovered that the original idea wasn’t quite right—but somewhere inside trying it, you saw a better one.
None of that means the attempt failed.
It means you have more information than you had before.
Don’t Ask Only, “Did It Work?”
I think this is where we can get ourselves in trouble.
We try something once and immediately want to give it a grade.
Did it work?
Yes or no.
Success or failure.
Keep it or kill it.
But sometimes that question comes too early.
A better question might be:
What did this teach me?
What surprised me?
What felt harder than it should have?
What did people respond to?
What did they ignore?
What would I change if I tried it again?
Those questions help you read what your business is telling you after the idea leaves your head and meets the real world.
Some Things Need More Than One Try
There’s another side to this too.
Not everything deserves a second attempt.
Sometimes trying something teaches you exactly what you needed to know:
Nope. We’re not doing that again.
😂
That’s useful information too.
But other times the first attempt isn’t really a verdict.
It’s a prototype.
A rough draft.
Version one.
You learned enough to make version two better.
And version two may teach you something that version one couldn’t.
That’s why I don’t think learning requires us to defend every idea we have.
Sometimes learning means changing it.
Sometimes it means simplifying it.
Sometimes it means letting it go.
And sometimes it means realizing:
There’s something here. Keep going.
We’re Learning Too
There are several things we’re trying right now at Red Alpha.
Red Alpha Studios itself is still something we’re learning from.
We’re experimenting with different kinds of stories, different ways of presenting them and different ways for people to experience them.
Some ideas are going to stick.
Some will change.
Some may disappear completely.
And there are probably things we’ll be doing a year from now that we haven’t even thought of yet.
I’m okay with that.
Because the goal isn’t to pretend we already know what all of this becomes.
The goal is to pay attention while we’re building it.
Every time we make something real enough to put in front of people, we get information we couldn’t get while it was still sitting in our heads.
Read What Happened
That’s part of reading a business between the lines too.
You don’t only read the problems.
You don’t only read the possibilities.
You also read the results of what you tried.
Not just the numbers.
The reactions.
The friction.
The surprises.
The questions.
The things that felt natural.
The things that felt forced.
The little signal that makes you think:
Wait a minute. Maybe there’s something here.
Friday’s question was:
What are you willing to try?
Today’s question is:
What Did You Learn When You Tried?
Don’t rush past the answer.
Your business might already be showing you what to try next.
What if? → Let’s find out. → What did we learn?
— Ruben
