Listen up perfectionists!
Normally, we don’t do things perfectly the first time. Nobody does. Books have been written by successful people telling how early on they set a goal to be more successful, earn more money, whatever. Then faced failure after failure.
What this means is they didn’t do it right the first time, second or 3rd. They got it wrong each time. Until one day through time and patience, and education, they finally got it right.
But that’s not what I’m talking about today. What lures me to the keyboard is how even a mistake can be successful.
What if one wrong word – one misspelled word or typo could create a groundswell of discussion, bringing traffic, clients and opportunity?
Here’s a story about the little typo who could.
One aspect of the Internet that’s always given me a chuckle is the “lore” of it. You’ve got rumors, silly stories and straw man arguments passed from one person to another. There are urban myths forwarded to our email boxes touting some threat or warning we need to heed immediately. There are embarrassing blunders that people can’t stop talking about.
For me, I fit into the categories of the embarassing blunders – but I couldn’t be more happy about it.
You see, I caused a grave error. I misspelled a word…
You might ask yourself why I am writing about a misspelling and more importantly, why you are reading about a misspelling.
The reason is this one misspelling word is one of the most blogged about linkbacks to this site.
So what is this word? In my article 10 Steps You Can Take To Guarantee Failure, I misspelled the word definitely. I’ve known about this typo for months. Endless emails, blog posts, a Digg discussion, comments and an instant message or two have alerted me to this fact. Yet, I still leave it misspelled. I could correct it any time.
But with all the traffic coming to witness this horrific error, why would I change it?
The chatter has made visitors read the article very closely. As a result, they got the message. One magazine is going to reprint it (minus the typo). It’s being added to newsletters. More than one TV network has added it to their site as “recommended.”
So the moral of the story is, it’s ok to shoot for perfection, but sometimes it’s ok or even better if we don’t quite make it.
…definately.
