Small failures eventually become big successes
The book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb inspired this post
Tinkering is, in essence, trial and error
When we tinker, we fail. When we fail, we obtain information. When we obtain information, we can use it to accomplish things better. Sometimes you have to jump in blindly to see what happens.
Examples of tinkering in our business
Buying a property in a new area
Taking out a loan with a different lender
Using another material supplier to build our properties
The best part about tinkering is that it gives you feedback
In the example above, we decided to buy property in a new area. If the deal goes exceptionally well, that is feedback. If the project fails, that's also feedback (expensive feedback). With this information, we can influence the subsequent decisions we make:
If it worked: Reinforce what we tinkered with before
Continue to buy properties in that area
If it slightly worked: Make it better
Build various property models more suitable to the area
If it didn’t work: Avoid it and take a different route
Search in a different location or go back to the areas that worked
If we never try new things, we will continue to get the same outcome
Getting the same result as before is not bad, but there will not be any innovation. The world moves fast. Those who tinker will eventually get it right. People never remember the experiments that failed, only those that succeeded, so it doesn't hurt to experiment. If it is a failure, nobody will care. If it is a success, you can change the world. In these cases, the upside is enormous, and the downside is minute.
Failures that no one remembers
Amazon’s fire phone attempt (google it)
Michael Jordan missed > 9,000 shots in his career
12 different publishing houses rejected JK Rowling before Harry Potter was published
The best way to go about it is to fail small
Tinker in small enough increments to where you can always recover from your experiments and try again. Try enough times, and you'll find a better way. Find a better way, and you become more valuable. The critical point here is to make sure that you don't fail to the point where you risk ruining your business, career, or reputation.
Examples of tinkering small
Buy three properties in that new area instead of ten
Try out a different floor plan for those three properties
Rent those properties out instead of selling them
Tinkering works in any area of your life
An excellent analogy to tinkering is when you were a kid and touched the hot stove without knowing you would get burned. It’s a mistake that we learned from and never did again. Life is a continuous cycle of touching hot stoves, getting burned, and learning from them. Many of us get stuck doing things the same way over and over. The only way to figure out if there is a more suitable way is to try it out and see what happens.
Gonna start tinkering ASAP