If one thing above all defines your success it's resilience.

It's one of the hardest things to make a habit.

When you keep going in the face of adversity after adversity.

When you don't have all the data you need to make a decision.

When your path isn't clearly defined.

Take A/B testing

One of the cornerstones of developing consistently good sales and conversion.

For those that don’t know it is basically testing a variation of the primary offer, call to action (even a headline).

It’s when you test two almost identical versions of your offer your control version or “A” version and a test where a variable changes (cusch as the call to action, the headline, the descriptive copy you use to sell whatever it is you’re selling).

I once had a discussion with Ronny Kohavi - a testing legend who has forgotten more about testing than probably most people know.

He worked for Microsoft at the time and I never forgot his advice.

He told me, “Your idea? your A versus B? it will most likely fail”.

”Everyone thinks what they’re doing is great until it is faced with 10s of thousands of users doing it at scale”.

He also said about 75% of the designed tests would not move anything in a positive direction.

But then he said something that always stuck with me.

But failing is the trick

What he meant was that if you fail enough at something you’ll eventually find what works.

Ronny was not trying to discourage me, he was trying to say that experimentation is a science and that all you are doing is testing idea after idea till you get it right.

Not giving up when things fail is the point.

It's very easy to give up when you’re onto the 10th or 15th variation of your test and it hasn’t moved the needle.

But that's what separates the successful test from the non events. Amazon one of the companies Ronny worked at and pioneered their early testing programs has a conversion rate of 10-15%.

That’s part of the reason they make $1.4bn per day.

The fact that they have resilience built into their core culture and have been testing since 2002 running thousands of tests per day.

The culture to work the angles when things fail.

If you can resiliently keep going when it looks like no one cares because you believe in what you're doing then your time will come.