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Nobody remembers your failures
Forgotten Failures
Mark Cuban started a powdered milk company out of college, and it was brutally awful. Hardly anyone knows it existed, which is the point: nobody remembers an entrepreneur's failures.
A Public Miss
He has been wrong in public too. In an interview, he predicted that MP3s were going away, because the music industry would want copy protection on everything. Subscriptions became more prevalent and the industry stopped caring, so he could not have been more wrong.
Misses and Makes
He has been wrong a lot and right more. Michael Jordan has talked about how many game-winning shots he missed, and the shots people remember are the ones that went in.
Why do people overestimate who notices their mistakes?
Psychologists call it the spotlight effect. In a 2000 experiment, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky of Cornell had students walk into a room wearing a T-shirt with Barry Manilow's face on it. The students guessed about half the room would notice, and only about a quarter did. The results appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
How many shots did Michael Jordan miss?
In a 1997 Nike commercial, Jordan said he had missed more than 9,000 shots in his career, lost almost 300 games, and missed 26 times when trusted to take the game-winning shot. He won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s.
Why did MP3s survive copy protection plans?
The music industry's Secure Digital Music Initiative, launched in 1998, tried to build copy-protected formats, and a public challenge in 2000 to break its watermarks was solved by researchers led by Princeton's Edward Felten. Spotify launched in 2008, and Apple dropped copy protection from iTunes Store songs in 2009. The German research institute Fraunhofer ended its MP3 licensing program in 2017.
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