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Editor’s Note: This article was published in the September, 1973 issue of the Real Estate News Observer.
Mistakes are easy to correct. I know. I have corrected hundreds of them. They are not difficult to recognize after awhile. They are difficult to recognize when you first make them – but as time speeds on, your vision becomes quite clear and 20/ 20 vision is the gift of all critics and historians.
We don’t usually die for our mistakes like frontiersmen did. Ours is not the loss of water on the desert, the wet powder in the barrel, or, the deep snow in the mountain pass.
Our business mistakes show up in our financial statement. The lessons learned from those mistakes show up later – in our statement.
Most of us in exchanging are not afraid to lead the way down unopened paths with no tracks on it or around it. Some of those paths look good at first – but dead end – and the traveler must reverse and go back to “Go.” Unlike “MONOPOLY,” however, the weary traveler does not collect $200.00 – he probably lost $20,000.00.
Like Edison said to his assistant when the younger man suggested they quit trying to invent the light bulb and wondered out loud what they had learned so far from all of their mistakes – “Well, we know 930 ways how not to make a light bulb.” We know a lot of ways not to do business.
In the world of excellence, an “excellent person” is not happy doing business the old way when he finds a better way to do it. So, turned on to a new way, he begins to educate himself and get experience in this new way. He makes mistakes – it is the only way.
