Internet marketing requires courage

Most of you know I named my second book, “Do It Wrong Quickly,” which is a snarky way of saying you won’t get it perfect, so you can’t let that stop you from trying. But I got to thinking about how so many of the things that we do are harder than they need to be, not because they are intrinsically difficult, but because we make them difficult by worrying about whether they will succeed—and what happens if we fail.

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It reminded me of a story someone once told me. I don’t know the origination of the story and maybe someone can attribute it properly, but it is something we need to think about from time to time in Internet marketing.
Imagine that someone took a 2×4 piece of wood—a long plank—and set it on the floor, challenging you to walk across the plank without your feet slipping off the plank and touching the floor. Piece of cake, right? Nothing hard about that. It requires a wee bit of balance but nothing the average person can’t manage.
Now, suppose that we suspend the 2×4 1000 feet in the air. Do you feel as confident? No? Why not?
It has nothing to do with the task—both tasks are exactly the same. It has to do with the risk surrounding failure. Too often, we obsess about what will happen if this marketing tactic or that tactic doesn’t work. What if we try something and we fail? We “awful-ize” our situation and make the stakes higher and higher until we are paralyzed from trying even simple tasks.
Sometimes these fears are quite justified, but they often reside mostly in our heads. Especially for Internet marketing, the risks are quite low, because failure is not that costly. So, take your plank and lay it on the floor and start walking across it. If you slip, it won’t be that bad.