Failure is Obsolete: The Ultimate Strategy to Create Recurring Success in Your Business and Your Life - Softcover

Rabhan, Benji

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1614485070 ISBN 13: 9781614485070

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing, 2013

Synopsis

What would you do differently if you could predict success or failure on a reliable basis? Would you take action on your ideas faster? Would you feel more confident?
""Failure is Obsolete"" is a recipe for a new kind of experimentation. It's a strategy to help you make better, more successful decisions in your business and your life by testing high-risk decisions in a low-risk environment. With the right parameters in place, you can predict the eventual success or failure of almost any decision you need to make.
This is not just another take on business success. Its a whole new perspective on how you can move forward confidently in every aspect of life. It could completely change the way you think and make decisions everyday.

About this title

About the Author

Through speaking, training, and consulting, Benji Rabhan helps large and small businesses improve their online presence and make more money with their websites. Ever since he built his first ecommerce website at the age of 13, he has been driven to consistently improve results for his clients. As a recipient of the Empact100 List of Top American Entrepreneurs, he now consults with multi-million-dollar companies helping them maintain sustainable growth despite a challenging economic environment. Find out more at www.BenjiRabhan.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Failure is Obsolete

The Ultimate Strategy to Create Recurring Success in Your Business and Your Life

By Benji Rabhan

Morgan James Publishing

Copyright © 2013 Benji Rabhan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61448-507-0

Contents

1. FAILURE IS WHAT?, 
2. WHAT IS TEST BEFORE YOU TEST?, 
3. BUSINESS, 
4. CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION (CRO), 
5. LIFE, 
6. CONCLUSION, 

CHAPTER 1

FAILURE IS WHAT?

What is this all about? Can you really predict success on a reliable basis?

When I was young, everything was an experiment. I was always exploring things; taking them apart; figuring out how they worked - and how they could work for me.

How does the phone work?

Why does it plug into the wall?

Where do the wires go?

How does my voice travel over those wires?

How can I get a phone in MY room?

These were questions I was asking when I was six. Why did my older sister have a phone in her room when I did not? This was supremely unfair in my six-year-old mind! So, I set out to do something about it — using experimentation. Here's what happened.

It was one of those '90s era phones with a transparent case so you could see all the colored wires and inside workings. She was so proud of it, so naturally I took an interest in it, too. I saw the blue, red, green, and yellow wires and figured out that's what phone wiring was all about.

One day I opened up the phone jack that Lindsey's phone was plugged into. (Yes, I took apart the wall socket.) Inside the jack, I saw the same colored wires, and figured out that was how the phone connected to the outside world. Through these colored wires. Cool! Then I put the wall plate back on and nobody was the wiser.

When I got back to my room, I opened up a flat plate on my wall to see what was inside that one. The same four colored wires all tangled up and shoved back into the wall. Hmm. Interesting.

Through my process of logic and testing, I figured out that I could literally unhook my sister's phone from the wall, rewire the jack, and make it work in my room. And that's what I did. I stole my sister's phone and hooked it up in my room. (Now, the reason I was in that room was because it was little more than a closet. No phone jack, no TV hook-up, nothing. But I was six. My parents figured I didn't need more than that, and they were right. Little did they know, I had other ideas.)

Well, you can imagine what happened that evening. My sister came home and was so angry because I had stolen her phone. My parents were completely confused because they didn't think I had a phone jack in my room.

Where had it come from? They never figured out that I had reached into the wall and rewired my bedroom. And I never told them. Well, not until much later. It's a funny story now, but they wouldn't have been amused when I was six.

The point is I wanted to know everything about everything. So I was always testing things. Experimenting. Reverse-engineering. Testing was my way of exploring the unknown cautiously, a little bit at a time. I could make small leaps of logic, test the effect, and then move forward accordingly.

If I tested connecting the phone wires and they didn't work, then I wouldn't do that again. I'd do something different. Maybe I'd connect them in a different order. Maybe I'd give up on the idea entirely and go take the blender apart.

If I tested my parents' reaction to my "acquiring" my sister's phone and I got away with it, well, what else could I get away with acquiring? The family computer? Maybe.

I had no fear of the consequences because I was making little tests. And, because they were little, I could reverse course quickly before any major damage was done. Also, because they were little, I could make forward progress really fast. Very important in life, as well as in the business world.

This was just how I learned — test, assess, make corrections, test again, correct again. Tiny course corrections meant I ultimately stayed on course to a (usually) successful completion of my goal or task. I didn't want help. I didn't want someone else to tell me his answer. I wanted to figure it out on my own.

I wasn't interested in theories and guesswork and going around an idea the long way. I wanted to know the answer, the real answer, as quickly as possible so I could move on to the next cool thing.

That state of mind made school really difficult. It wasn't that I was "lazy" or couldn't focus for long periods of time … wait, no, it was that I couldn't focus for long periods of time. But that wasn't a bad thing. It was just that I saw so many amazing things in the world, and I wanted to experience all of them. Right Now.

My teachers used to complain that I wasn't "with the class," and they were right. I was far away, in another galaxy — where things moved at my pace.

So what does this have to do with you?

Everything! Because the whole world is becoming completely distractible — like everyone has contracted Attention Deficit Disorder ( ADD). It's being forced on us from all sides. Our attention span is about as awesome as a gnat. And it's not our fault.

It's all about speed and volume. It's about how much information you can absorb, and how fast you can absorb it and react to it. Have you watched any TV news channel recently? You're listening to multiple people argue about an issue, while simultaneously watching streaming headlines above and below them. Oh, and we'll throw in a ticking bar with comments on the side. (You know, just in case you get bored.) Oh, and while you're watching, you might also have a laptop or iPad open and a phone to your ear.

Each stream of information ticking by faster than our parents could read. Each stream fighting for our attention. This style of information delivery is all around us. Even when we try to slow down and watch a simple 30-minute sitcom, camera angles change every 5 seconds. And advertising bombards our senses all day, every day, even in our sleep. (Be honest, do you sleep with your cell phone next to your bed?)

— Education is becoming self-guided. (Thank goodness!)

— Technology is developing at mind-bending speed.

— Twitter and texting have reduced our conversations down to 140 abbreviated characters.

— And there's no such thing as a lifetime career anymore. People are expected to switch their line of work an average of seven times.

Whether you like it or not information overload is part of daily life. You can either let it drag you down or you can get excited.

This book is all about my strategy for experimenting.

Have you ever heard the saying, "If you must fail, do it quickly and move on"? With this new strategy, you will learn how to experiment and test high-risk ideas in a low-risk environment, practically eliminating the need to fail at all. You will know with almost complete certainty whether an idea will succeed or fail before you invest a lot of time, energy, or money into it.

This strategy is all about getting to the truth of the matter, no matter what the matter is, as quickly as possible. Once you know the truth, you can take the appropriate action to lead you to your goals.

It's also all about risk. Or, more specifically, your risk tolerance. Would you rather bet on a sure thing or go into a risky situation with only a guess as to what's going to happen? The techniques you're going to discover will help you get as close to that sure thing as possible before you bet the farm.

People who don't know me very well tend to think I'm a big risk-taker. They see me starting multiple businesses, investing in growth, even skydiving, and they think he must be some kind of adrenaline junkie. But really this is just an illusion.

The reality is I hate taking risks. Well, I hate taking risks without a whole lot of confidence that everything is going to turn out in my favor. Even jumping out of a perfectly good airplane didn't seem like a risk to me because I knew the statistics proved that I'd most likely be perfectly fine.

I can trace all this back to two of my childhood mentors, my father, Joe, and my grandfather. They didn't know it at the time, but I watched how they made decisions, what motivated them, and how they invested their time and their money. Their actions shaped how I approached life.

You see, my grandfather was an entrepreneur with a very high risk tolerance. Sometimes things worked out for him, and sometimes they didn't. The high points balanced out the low points for him. I imagine it's the same story for any big risk-taker.

My father, on the other hand, gravitated in the other direction and developed a low risk tolerance. He liked to know the facts, and be sure of how things would turn out.

One of the riskiest financial choices my father ever made was becoming an entrepreneur after a 25-year career in the same large corporation. During those corporate years, he had worked his way up from dishwasher to general manager of a major chain of luxury hotels. Yet he decided to take the leap and opened The Avenue Inn Bed and Breakfast in New Orleans — a gorgeous 1891 Victorian mansion with 17 bedrooms, right on the streetcar line.

Starting your own business is a major investment of time, energy, and money, especially in the hotel space. It was extremely risky to do what he did. And, until recently, I thought it was very out of character for him. It kind of baffled me how he managed to take such a big step when he normally preferred safer waters.

Now that I look back at those days through the filter of my own choices, I can see that he was able to do it because he had confidence in his experience and his knowledge of the industry. And he had every right to be confident. He knew he would succeed, so it didn't seem so risky. Knowing that now, I probably would have made the same choice if I had been in his position.

That decision paid off for our family. The Avenue Inn Bed and Breakfast survived the tourism crash after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the terrible economic climate of the past several years for two simple reasons, my father's creativity and his expertise in the industry. Because of this, my father and mother still welcome guests today. In fact, the business is doing better than ever. It turned out to be a great move for our family. It was a risk, but a calculated one.

Both these men had great influence on my life, though they probably didn't know it (until they read this book). I saw the positive and the negative sides of both the high-risk and low-risk lifestyles. I didn't want to be exactly like either of them; I wanted the best of both worlds. I wanted to have the excitement and reward of risk, but only if I knew it was a sure thing. That sounds like an impossible task, doesn't it? Well, it doesn't have to be!

Isn't that what we all want, at least some of the time? To be fairly sure our ventures and ideas are going to turn out in our favor?

Combining my father and grandfather's influence with my natural inclination to experiment and reverse-engineer things helped me come up with the strategies I use every day. You're going to learn to use some of those strategies.

As a child, I was envious of my grandfather's entrepreneurial spirit. But I grew up mostly like my dad. I choose to make my decisions and take risks based on facts, not wild guesses, unknowns, or promises.

Why should you care about this stuff?

The point is people aren't waiting around until half their lives have gone by to figure out how to succeed. We're taught to start setting goals and dreams for ourselves in kindergarten, but we aren't really taught how to make those goals and dreams happen quickly. We're told to "work hard" and "keep at it" and eventually we'll get what we want. Maybe.

Yeah. I'm not very good at waiting. If it's not going to happen, I'd rather move on.

So I consciously decided to get a lifetime of experience in as little time as possible. Fast. Like life. So I could put more life into my years and really LIVE. And if you're reading this book, I think you've probably made a similar choice; or at least you dream about it.

Did you know more and more teenagers are becoming millionaires these days? They don't want to wait until they "grow up" and "climb the corporate ladder" to be successful. And they don't have to. Thanks to the speed of technology and freedom of information, they can do what they want, when they want to, where they want to — and be more successful than their parents or grandparents ever dreamed possible.

Kids are being handed iPads before they can even form sentences. The whole world is at their fingertips before they reach preschool. Facts, figures, and formulas are available to them anytime. Slowly, but surely, education is shifting. In the next 15 years, it will be a very different experience than what any of us had before technology was so common in life and schools.

The world is changing! You can get ahead or get left behind. Don't want to wind up working for your grand-children? Then learn this stuff now. Because those tots are not going to wait until they graduate college before they change the world. They're going to do it much sooner. And you can label them ADHD, you can feed them drugs to slow them down, but in the end, they are the future. And the future will move at the speed of thought.

I think the older you are the harder it is to believe that a 12year-old can start up a new business and leave you in the dust. But it's true. It happens everyday.

The good news is you can do it, too, with the right frame of mind and some good strategy behind you.

Want proof? I can give you many examples. I'm actually one of them. At age 11, I was already dreaming of my first company, and even built a website for it. It was called Silver Wizard, Inc. Even though the company was imaginary, we had a real website.

I built my first ecommerce website for a client at the age of 13. I've started or partnered in dozens of businesses — some were successful, some weren't. But I consciously cataloged the lessons learned from each one, and used those lessons to make the next one better. I've had tons of experiences crammed into a short span of time, leaving (hopefully) many productive years ahead to build more and more successes. I've got friends younger than me making millions of dollars with their ideas …and they're only getting started.

Take my friend, Emerson Spartz, for example. He built a small Harry Potter fan website when he was 12 years old. Today MuggleNet is the most successful Harry Potter site on the web. Even with the final books and movies long since past, the site continues as a thriving community of fans. They publish comprehensive reference books, post stories and artwork; and J.K. Rowling herself has been known to pop in now and then (though she never announces herself.) Spartz Media is now one of the fastest growing digital media publishers worth millions of dollars.

More and more young people are starting businesses and getting those first awkward mistakes out of the way very early in life. Which means by the time they reach 19 or 20, they are serious competition for anyone else in their industry.

An eight-year-old can build a website that makes money. That's the easy part. The hard part is making sound decisions with clarity and speed. It's that clarity and speed that separates successful businesses (and successful lives) from the less successful ones.

The old way of thinking was that it takes years or even decades of experience before you know enough to make good decisions and be successful. It was called "paying your dues."

With modern technology and the techniques I'm going to explain, you can make the right decision in as little as a few minutes.

People today are so bombarded with information that they get paralyzed. They live in fear of making the wrong decision, so instead they make NO decision. You're going to have a methodical way to figure out the best option as quickly as you can, especially when you're faced with an eternity of options.

I want to give you a glimpse into the future and help you succeed there. This is how you can make decisions faster, based on reality, instead of guesswork or biased interpretation.

How this methodology got started

When I was a kid, they tested my learning style, and I scored evenly across audio, visual, and kinesthetic learning. I was different, and that was good (at least to me). This meant I was free to develop my own learning style. I didn't think much of it while growing up, but now I realize I wound up developing the strategies you're about to discover.

This learning style was just how I lived my life. I didn't think it was anything special until I started paying attention to other people. This was NOT how they lived their lives, and they experienced needless wasted time and effort taking the slow way around things. When friends asked me for advice, I could almost always come up with a way to circumvent the problem and wind up with a successful outcome in half the time.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Failure is Obsolete by Benji Rabhan. Copyright © 2013 Benji Rabhan. Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1614485070
• ISBN 13: 9781614485070
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172