If you ship generous work and it doesn’t connect with the desired audience, you may have had an outcome you didn’t hope for, but the practice itself isn’t a failure. Of my 7,500 blog posts, half of them are below average compared to the others, on any metric you’d care to measure. Popularity, impact, virality, longevity. That’s simple arithmetic. The practice embraces that simple truth. It’s all a way of understanding that if you have a practice, failure (in quotes if you wish) is part of it.
