Test everything: most ideas fail; winning strategies are never obvious upfront

Even successful businesses see only one in three tests succeed. Industry experts routinely expect that only one in five to one in ten brilliant ideas will actually work in the marketplace. If you're not prepared for that failure rate, you'll personalize every miss and stop experimenting. The mindset that protects you is simple: everything is a test. Not a validation of your worth. Not proof you're on the right track. A test. Winning strategies are almost never obvious before testing — if they were, everyone would already be using them. Build the expectation of failure into your operating model so that individual failures don't stop the experimentation that eventually produces the winners.