Mark Rober is a former NASA engineer, now a YouTube content creator.
He’s known for creating wild gadgets and doing crazy experiments.
His most notable ones?
The world’s largest Super Soaker water gun, the world’s largest Nerf Gun, a dartboard machine where you’d land a bulls-eye no matter where you threw the dart.
In 2018, he gave a TED Talk about The Super Mario Effect.
He prefaced his talk with an experiment he once did.
He gave a coding problem to a group of two, with only one slight variation.
In version A, if the person fails to solve the problem, a text box will pop up that says, “That didn’t work. Please try again.”
In version B, a text box will say, “That didn’t work. You lost 5 points. You now have X amount of points. Please try again.”
Here were the results:
The group in version A succeeded 68% of the time, with an average attempt of 12.
In version B, the success rate was 52%, with an average attempt of five.
So what does all this data mean?
People are more willing to succeed when they aren’t so concerned with failure.
Unfortunately, a little something that takes up 16 years of our life called school didn’t train us to think that way. In fact, it did the exact opposite.
If you’re behind on learning the class material, you may have trouble doing the homework assignments, trouble with exams, end up with a bad grade, and may or may not have to repeat the class (Or grade).
And that system leads to a lot of pressure, stress, discouragement, anxiety, and possibly the self-questioning of people’s intelligence.
Way too many times, I hear people say, “This is too hard. I give up.”
Well, how much different would things be if you weren’t concerned with failure?
Do you think successful business owners grew their businesses without going through failures?
Of course, they did, and most likely a lot of failures. They just don’t share it as much as they share their successes.
Were my emails from one year ago as good as they are now?
No way. Sometimes I look back and I just cringe from reading my old emails.
It took quite a bit of learning to get to where I am now, and I’m still learning because there’s always room for improvement.
But if you want to learn my ways of writing emails, take a look at How to Become an Email Titan.
Use the link below to get the sample chapters.