A friend recently asked me a question I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

Why do some people take action on their ideas and others don’t?

Some people, when they come up with a new idea, just dive right in. They start trying things, making mistakes, and figuring it out. They’re biased towards action. But other people, in the same situation, bury their idea. They ignore it, try to pretend it doesn’t exist, or talk themselves out of giving it a shot.

Why is that?

I told my friend it’s probably a learned response.

For me, I was lucky enough that some of my early ideas worked out. When I was seventeen, I started a t-shirt company out of the trunk of my car. I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t know how to design t-shirts. I didn’t know how to run a business. I didn’t know about things like economies of scale or cost of goods sold.

But despite all that, it worked out better than I could’ve imagined. A year or so after I started the business, my shirts were being sold in Urban Outfitters.

That experience taught me that good things happen when you chase an idea. It taught me that putting myself out there and trying things can lead to incredible results.

But I can see how the opposite would be true. In fact, I have seen it play out plenty of times in other people’s lives: an early idea gets shot down, a project doesn’t go as well as you’d hoped, a company you start fails.

In that case, the lesson that gets learned is “Taking action only leads to you getting hurt. Trying to bring your ideas to life only reveals that you’re not up to the task, and you end up embarrassed and broke.”

The thing is, neither of these lessons is actually correct. Every journey is going to involve a mixture of success and failure. But when one side outweighs the other, your focus gets drawn to that side. Succeed more than you fail, and success starts to feel like a strong possibility. But when the scales tip the other way, you start to feel like you’re doomed to failure.

Here’s the interesting thing: it doesn’t actually matter if the wins outweigh the losses. What matters is how we remember the story.

Humans don’t respond to facts nearly as strongly as we respond to our own feelings about those facts. Our behavior is often driven less by what actually happened and more by how we remember what happened.

That memory tends to hinge on one question: How did it end?

Take my t-shirts, for example. When I boil that story down to an anecdote, it sounds like “I started selling t-shirts to my friends, and a year or so later I’d achieved international retail distribution.”

That’s all true, but it’s not the entire story. The real story involved a lot of trying and failing. It involved some shirts that sold well and others that didn’t. It involved managing risks and learning how to run a business on the fly. It involved misprints and lost money and all sorts of other setbacks.

But because the project ultimately succeeded, my brain smooths over all those details. The failures fade into the background, and what remains is a simple story: "I had an idea, I pursued it, and it worked out.”

And I think that’s an important thing to pay attention to, because that pattern shows up a lot in life.

For instance, do you know what the difference is between a tragedy and a comedy?

Both styles explore the same themes: conflict, hardship, and the difficulty of the human condition. But in classical literature, a comedy ends with a wedding and a tragedy ends with a funeral.

That one factor — how the story ends — determines how we classify the entire thing.

The same is true of our own stories. We all face periods of struggle, of difficulty, of one dead end after another. If we give up, our brain says “that was a tragedy”. But if we persevere and overcome, our brain says “that was worth it.”

Every success story contains a graveyard of failed attempts that most people never see. But once the story ends well, our brains tend to package all of those failures together and label them "part of the process.” The whole story gets summed up as: “I kept going, and it all worked out.”

That’s the secret: keep going. If you’re in a period of loss after loss, giving up now means the memory will get filed under “tragedy”. But if you can hang in there and eke out a victory, even if that victory looks different than you thought it would, the losses along the way will feel like they were just steps in the journey to success.

Humans love a good comeback story. Some of the best sports games in history featured teams who were down the entire game, then fought back to win in the final seconds. The struggle along the way doesn’t take away from the victory, either. It makes it that much more satisfying.

In sports, the only thing that matters is what the scoreboard says when the clock runs out. But in the creative process, there’s no clock.

The game isn’t over until you say it is.

Happy Friday, friends. Make it a good one.

Kyle Scheele
Helping Organizations Build & Launch Better Ideas, Faster
​www.KyleScheele.com​