By Maribeth Kuzmeski
One of the issues with hard work is that when we do it, we want and need it to pay off. However, sometimes it doesn’t. This can make us question whether to put time, effort, and money behind a new major initiative or marketing strategy because of the potential of wasted time and no return.
Did you know that Thomas Edison’s inventions of the light bulb and the storage battery were preceded by thousands and thousands of experiments, theories, and hard work before he discovered the successful formula?
Yet, we often find that small firms will give up on a marketing strategy after just one effort (or never start it at all) because what they desire is an elusive, quick fix boost in new business. But when we look at the most successful individuals and businesses, they almost always failed big, spent time and money, and subsequently learned the answer to generating success.
Part of the hard work is spent learning what works, and often that doesn’t happen on the first try. I don’t think any of us are afraid of hard work. We are afraid of wasting our time. But if we don’t try, the success often never comes.
Maribeth,
So true with continuing to try and not giving up easily. I have been to the Thomas Edison museum in Fort Meyer’s on several occasions. Edison made enough money from the invention of the stock ticker tape machine to become a full-time inventor! One of the earliest practical stock ticker machines, the Universal Stock Ticker developed by Thomas Edison in 1869, used alphanumeric characters with a printing speed of approximately one character per second.
Previously, stock prices had been hand-delivered via written or verbal messages. Since the useful time-span of individual quotes is very brief, they generally had not been sent long distances; aggregated summaries, typically for one day, were sent instead. The increase in speed provided by the ticker allowed for faster and more exact sales. Since the ticker ran continuously, updates to a stock’s price whenever the price changed became effective much faster and trading became a more time sensitive matter. For the first time, trades were being done in what is now thought of as near real-time