It’s common knowledge that Thomas Edison invented the first light bulb.
Except he didn’t.
He actually came late to the game.
In 1878 when the the inventor decided to focus on building a light bulb, 23 others had already invented early versions called arc lamps some of which were already being used.
So how did Edison win in such a crowded field when he was so far behind?
He spent a year working day and night doing experiments.
Thousands of them.
On October 21, 1879, he succeeded in creating a light bulb for everyday use in the home.
Edison would go on to pioneer five different multibillion-dollar fields with his invention factory: electricity, motion pictures, telecommunications, batteries, and sound recording.
He was the 19th centuries Elon Musk.
As a recent BI article points out deliberate experimentation beats out deliberate practise every time.
A 2014 review of 88 previous studies found that “deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.”
From Jeff Bezos:
“Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day,”
Or Mark Zuckerberg:
“One of the things I’m most proud of that is really key to our success is this testing framework … At any given point in time, there isn’t just one version of Facebook running. There are probably 10,000.”
Practise may help you in fields that change slowly but it’s much less helpful areas like business that change rapidly.
Experiments isn’t literal.
You don’t need to get out the test tubes and the bunsen burner.
But you do need to test new questions, new offers, new marketing – all the time.
Many won’t survive reality but one that does could return 1000x from what you put in.
Resting on knowledge and experience without testing is a sure fire way to get overtaken.
